I felt dizzy with the effort so I closed my eyes again and tried to imagine the breeze washing over my face. It didn’t come, but instead a cool wetness spilled over my lips, and I opened my eyes to see the man with the mask standing over me, his arm outstretched, a white cup pressed against my mouth. As with the sitting up, the fresh experience made me aware of the old one, and I could taste vomit, and it all came back. The hall. The voice. The bodies made of light.

‘Good morning,’ said the man. His voice was a little muffled by the mask. I couldn’t place his accent - possibly American - but he was black; I had seen a strip of arm between a sleeve and glove.

He stood and raised his arms above me. I tilted my head and saw that he was adjusting some kind of a tube - I followed it and saw that it entered my arm.

‘Where am I?’ I said, and was surprised at the effort it took.

‘You are in a clinic run by the Red Cross,’ he said. ‘You are very ill.’

A clinic. Of course it was a clinic - the tubes. That smell. Those objects on the shelves were bottles, I now saw. ‘The Red Cross’. That phrase was also familiar. It meant something. More than what it normally meant. It was connected with something. Like a player of patience, I racked my brains to match the pair.

‘“Finlandia”,’ I said, remembering another piece of the puzzle. ‘I heard a choir singing “Finlandia”.’

He nodded. ‘The Biafrans have taken it as their national anthem. They often play it on the radio.’

A string of pairs suddenly matched up.

‘Udi,’ I said. ‘Are we in Udi?’

The glove stopped the calibration of the tube, and the mask looked down at me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But we aren’t too far away.’

‘I need to get there.’

The mask nodded in understanding, while the gloves went back to their task. ‘You need to recover first,’ he said. ‘You’re very ill.’

‘Malaria?’

The doctor finished his work and then sat down in the chair he had been fanning me from earlier.

‘That’s what we thought at first,’ he said. ‘But now we’re not so sure. Do you feel you can talk?’

I nodded, and he took out a pad of paper and a pen from his coat.

‘When did you arrive in Nigeria?’ he asked.

It took me a few moments. ‘Monday,’ I said. ‘Monday evening.’

‘March 24th?’

‘Yes.’

He wrote it down, adjusting his peepholes a little to make it easier. ‘Have you taken any anti-malarial medication since arriving?’

I started to shake my head, but suddenly remembered the pills Manning had given me on the way back from the airport.

‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Yes, I have!’

The eyes in the mask stared back at me. ‘How did you take it?’