He tells her he cares little for flowers and promises her that instead each gift will be unique, something that only he would give.

He lays the stone on her open palm.

There, he says, for you.

It has a reassuring weight. Not quite heavy. At first, she thinks it is a rough sculpture of a woodlouse, much bigger of course as it almost fills her hand. It has a structure of rows of plates, like strips of samurai armour.

She giggles.

Trilobites lived in the oceans of deepest time, he says, age after age, through the Cambrian and Devonian.

She doesn't know these words but loves their evocation of distant, unattainable places, of violently unimaginable epochs.

They existed for two-hundred million years. Far longer than humans have been around. Far longer than humans will last. And now they are stone.

It's a fossil.

And yet, he says, I hate that word. The old fossil. Applied to decrepit game show hosts, aging rockstars or Colonel Blimp types.

Blimp?        

It doesn't matter. Before your time.

*

They sit together on the sofa. The trilobite lies on the surface of the glass coffee table while they touch and kiss, while she fetches wine and glasses. Wine spills on the table and forms little pools.

After he has gone she stands at the picture window of the apartment, high above the street. It is already darkening. People move in and out of the patches of light formed by the lampposts, and the shop windows. When it begins to rain it looks like static in the beams of the lamp light. In the downpour the people begin to move quicker, as though the tape of the world has been sped up, eager to reach its conclusion.

*

She reads about trilobites. They had been wiped out in the Permian Extinction, sometimes called the Great Dying. Carbon dioxide had been released into the atmosphere by volcanos. Eventually the oceans were depleted of oxygen.

She stands at the window cradling the fossil in her hands. It is midmorning and the streets are largely empty, the overcast sky dulling everything. The distant shop windows with their stacks of electrical goods and overdressed mannequins look like a museum display for something she can't quite fathom.

She should go out or call one of her old friends, but she knows that it has been too long, that she had become a kind of kept woman. No longer part of what she had once assumed was life.

*

I want to do something, she tells him. To go somewhere with you.

Don't you like this place? he says. He leaves the question incomplete. Don't you like this place that I have paid for?

Of course, it's just…

He listens. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't sigh. On the glass of the coffee table, near two champagne flutes, there is a necklace of diamonds. Some trick of the light has rendered them dull, the colour of glue. Earlier, when he had presented them to her, he had spoken about their age, even older than the fossil. Three billion years old. Formed under titanic pressures in the morning of the Earth.

It would be nice if I could wear them somewhere, wouldn't it? Show them off.

You can wear them for me here.

She should understand this. He has always been clear that they can never be seen together in public.

You should get out on your own more, he says, go shopping.

Everything is delivered.

But he doesn't hear as he pours two more glasses of champagne.

*

A fossil of a trilobite is formed after the soft parts of an animal decay and the remains sink into the sediments of the ocean's bottom. Then the harder parts, like the exoskeleton of the trilobite, are replaced over millions of years with molecules of minerals from these surrounding sediments.
        
She goes out. Nods to the concierge who doesn't recognise her. She wanders past the people in the street, past the microwave ovens, dishwashers, flat screen TVs, past the mannequins with their perfect figures. She buys clothes and has them sent up to fill the apartment's ample built-in wardrobes. She sits in a coffee shop and looks out of the window. People pass as though on a conveyor belt, as though they are off to be processed. There is nothing living here. Soon she will go back to the apartment.

I don't do flowers he had said, long ago, in a deep time she can hardly remember. So he had bought her diamonds, pearls, rubies. He had bought her lifeless statuettes from trendy new artists, electrical devices filled with cobalt, copper, manganese, and gold.

*

Why are you so sad? he asks.

And for a moment, in that apartment filled with all his gifts, so many that they have pressed into her being, threatened to infiltrate her very essence, for one moment she feels almost light again.

But before she can say anything he carries on speaking.
        
It's boring you know. If I wanted to be miserable I would be with my wife.
        
You have turned me to stone, she wants to say, but instead she goes to the window. She should be crying soft tears of sodium, magnesium and calcium.
        
She hardly notices as he coos soft words. As he holds her and then leads her to the bedroom.

*

The next morning the day stretches ahead like an interminable age. She packs a small suitcase of clothes. She leaves all his gifts except the trilobite which she carefully wraps in a scarf and tucks inside the case.
        
Outside it is raining. The people rush past. If only, now, the tape of the world would run backwards so that stone becomes flesh, so that instead of the inevitability of inertia and unfeeling, of a Great Dying, there was rather a vast blooming of life.
        
At the train station she buys a ticket. She must keep moving. Mustn't sink into the sediment below.
        
On the forecourt of the station and then on the platform the tread of the wet shoeprints of vanished passengers looks like trilobites. She boards the train. She hardly registers when it leaves.