‘ . . . Average temperatures across Wales are a balmy sixteen degrees, but with seasonal highs and lows of plus thirty-two and minus sixty-eight. The residents are well adapted to the climate, being generally impervious to hardship, more hirsute, and with a propensity to minimal weight loss during slumber  . . . ’

– Handbook of Winterology, 4th edition, Hodder & Stoughton

My eyes flickered open, my temples throbbed, my mouth felt dry. For the briefest of moments I thought I was once again safely back in the Melody Black, but no. Clytemnestra was staring down at me with a look that was beginning to feel increasingly oppressive, and next to her, the portrait of me wearing Birgitta’s husband’s body seemed also to have changed – he was looking less like someone in love, and more like someone with severe wakestipation.

I stretched, downed the glass of water I’d left for myself, then swung my legs out and lowered my feet to the soothingly cold boards of the floor. Regardless of the weirdness, I’d enjoyed the dream. It looked as though I had created a narrative that had all the ingredients of a thriller: a good-looking young couple in love and working for a shadowy organisation, an agent in peril, a missing recording cylinder, an interrogation, loss, betrayal. And all with me centre stage. Perhaps this was subconsciously what I saw for myself, my dream-fuddled mind generating a sense of excitement and drama that so far had been absent from my utterly conventional life. If I had another life, I’d dedicate it to non-Morphenox slumber, with all the dreams that come – and the attendant dormelogical risks. Perhaps Shamanic Bob and his dreamers had something after all.

There was a knock at the door. I guessed it must be Aurora, and I was correct. Her left eye was staring off and up to the right, while the right fixed me with a keen sense of clarity. The abrasively offensive Toccata part of her was gone; she was back to her more ebullient self. I actually felt quite relieved to see her.

‘I was passing,’ she said cheerily, ‘and I wanted to check you were okay.’

I didn’t know what to say, so said what I was thinking.

‘I didn’t realise you and Toccata were—’

Aurora glared at me with such a look of hurt, anger and confusion that I stopped mid-sentence.

‘I was about to say,’ I began again, ‘that I was unaware you and Toccata were  . . . so alike.’

She stared at me for a while, her good eye unblinking while her unseeing left eye twisted in its socket in a disturbing manner.

‘We are not alike,’ she said finally, ‘not even the slightest bit. Does that woman think we are?’

‘Well, no,’ I replied, truthfully enough.

‘Exactly. And that’s the way we’re going to keep it. Understand?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

I filled the empty pause that followed by offering her coffee.

‘You have some?’ she asked. ‘The real stuff, I mean?’