During these days in between the seasons I sprawl on my bed in my sixth-floor two-room apartment in the city that has adopted me, in a country that is not mine. I spend my time eating toast and watching people from the single small window of my apartment. There’s a woman I often see. She looks about thirty, or thirty five, or thirty six. In this weather she wears light strappy summer dresses. She hustles a black hulk of a Victorian pram and a little boy up the street past my building a couple of times a week. She wrestles the pram up and over the street kerbs, it seems improbably weighty. The little boy messes about and gets smacked on his ear for it; on their way back he is usually occupied with a lollipop or packet of crisps. The woman arranges plastic bags around the pram and her floral dress is damp down the middle of her back and sticks to her body. They don’t notice me, I think, leaning on my elbows out of my window.

Time passes suddenly and in jerks. The daytime moon that was straight ahead in the sky just a moment ago is now hiding half out of sight behind another building in the distance. It makes me feel travel sick. I clutch the edge of my bed melodramatically, imagining the Earth lurching beneath me. When this happens I become aware of time passing and begin to feel panicked. My breath comes short and I wonder what am I doing, filling my life with a vacuum, doing nothing but waiting? I notice that even with the apartment’s only window open wide this room is still airless. I can’t doze off and I put on shorts, plastic heart-shaped earrings and a sleeveless top and go out onto the street to walk off the anxiety.

The air is leaden with heat in the fallow days between seasons here, and the trees are indecisively both green and gold. The city’s smells are strong and sour. Traffic smells and food smells collide with the city’s bright colours: red, green, yellow, blue flyers given out on the street; women getting the last wear from their summer wardrobe. The cacophony of primary colours competes with the tsunamis of city noise crashing over my ears. The return to my apartment, by contrast, feels like returning to a nest or a womb. It’s empty, still and warm.

A few times one or other of my friends will come to visit, curious or concerned about my isolation. “Everyone needs to be on their own now and then,” I say to each of my house callers, buying myself time. The friends who know about Billy, and how we left things, read between the lines I feed them and back off. The others probably think that I am being a snob, or weird, or am pissed off with them. I just need space. To think. I’ll return to my friends soon, but every evening the night arrives earlier than before and I can’t help but feel that time is running out.

I deliberately lose my watch and don’t turn on my laptop. I keep my ‘phone with me but I cultivate a blind spot for the part of the screen that shows the date. I obsessively check the time on my ‘phone but rarely allow the information to sink in. Sometimes I forget to eat. I keep my cupboard well stocked with bread for the emergency toast making when hunger kicks me in the stomach.

Eventually I notice that I don’t open the window as much, and that I wake up with both my blanket and the sheet wrapped around me. Out on the street below I see that the Pram Woman is wearing a coat with big lapels now. The little boy keeps his hand on the handle of the pram and now he wears a red wind-cheater most days. The thought that Brother Autumn has arrived depresses me. I put on sneakers, jogging bottoms and my hoodie. I head out to look at the trees in the park before they undress themselves.

I stand beneath an old tree, not the oldest in the park judging by its size. My feet disappear in piles of leaves, brown and red and gold. Some of the leaves are not all the way crunchy yet. I run my right hand over the bark of the tree, imagining that some kind of rooted wisdom transmits itself from the tree to me. There’s a crack from above followed quickly by a thump from below. A conker rolls through the leaf piles to my toes. Its landing was too soft for the green spiky casing to split open. I look around the tree for more conkers, but it looks like this is the first to drop. I have many superstitions and this seems to me an omen, or good luck, so I pick up the conker and slip it into my hoodie’s front pocket.

At home I put the conker on the shelf above the sink in my narrow bathroom. Behind the conker sits my reflection in the bathroom mirror. “So autumn’s here,” I say to myself. Inside my body a feather pirouettes and strokes up my spine. I put my hand on where I think my womb might be. The decision that I haven’t made since May feels as though it has decided itself. “Hello,” I whisper.