Rare contact creates a stir. Gossip spreads. Tensions build. Denying Pissec, miserable Obelmäker and repressed Baumauer are all seething-jealous – openly or reservedly – within the hour. The pay rise promise is working a treat. Brichacek’s licking the tip of a pencil with her sticky pink tongue. “Stop flirting,” he tells her, but he looks at her breasts and thinks, The girls with the bruises in the sex films are just dead dolls, but this pretty toy is alive.

To Kalist, Baumauer’s just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.

Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people – and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?

You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.