On his wrist was a slim gold watch: some fancy Swiss make. I managed to reach out and unclasp it and held it in my palm, staring at the second hand as it slowly made its way around a smaller circle set within the dial. When it gets to the top, I told myself, you must straighten your legs. I breathed in as deeply as I could, and the ringing slowly began to subside. The room was completely silent and I couldn’t remember hearing anything since the thud of Akuji’s landing, so I lifted the watch to my ear and was rewarded with a faint tick-tick tick-tick tick-tick . . . Another wave of nausea swept over me, and I longed to find a bathroom and shit all the bad stuff out of my system. In the shapes behind my eyelids, I suddenly saw the rat from the bathroom sink of the Palace Hotel tunnelling towards me, its claws outstretched, and the landscape it was tunnelling through was my bowels. I looked back down at the circle in the dial and saw that there were five seconds, four, three, two, move now, move your legs, and there we were, rest. Rest. Breathe. Now look at the dial again. Through the rat. Ignore the rat, look past him, there, at the hand inside the circle, concentrate on the shape of it, yet another circle at the bottom, so many circles, but this one is like a pivot, and then the arrow of the hand through it, sweeping slowly around the soft gold field. Now follow that, yes, there we are, no ignore that, ignore that feeling, just keep watching, coming down, coming down, there, now it’s going up, focus, focus, not long to go, fifteen, smooth sweep, thirteen, twelve, coming up, are you ready, get ready to move your knees, now, now, shift your knees up and move your feet, both of them, a bit more, there you are, there! You’re sitting. Now you are sitting. Breathe slowly, not too much at a time, and take in your surroundings.

My heart jolted as I saw the rat scuttling across the floor. So I hadn’t imagined it? It was a large, dirty-looking brute with yellowish eyes and a bright red tail breaking through the coarse brown hair. It scampered over the mountain of Akuji’s body, past me and over to the other side of the room.

I watched the rat, following its movements obsessively, like a seasick passenger watching the waves. It placed me in the room and it made it easier to regulate my breathing and to hold the nausea at bay.