Only I wasn’t. I could vividly remember everything, right up until when Smale had shaken me and I had stopped breathing. But still, the fact that I was thinking meant I was alive: probably in a hospital somewhere, recovering.

I clung on to that idea for a very long time. I thought it must have been at least a few months since I’d ‘gone’ and ended up . . . wherever I was. That was when it occurred to me that perhaps death wasn’t what I had always thought it would be, but that it was a limbo state in which you had all eternity to reflect on the life you’d had, without being able to return to it.

My considerations of death were briefly interrupted by a series of extremely vivid hallucinations. One of these involved a tie I’d owned when I was a boy, a dark green silk tie with tiny red spots my father had bought me from Gieves when I’d turned sixteen, my last birthday in London before the war. The silk had been so thick and smooth it was like a river, and now it became just that and I dove deep into its comfort, luxuriating in its coolness and wishing I could stay there for ever, breathing bubbles up to the green, red-spotted surface. And then others started diving in after me, like the bodies in the ceremony I’d been at in Biafra, spirit bodies that cut through me and around me and seemed to keep diving further and further but never got any smaller or changed shape. And I wanted to climb up to the surface but I couldn’t, because it was blocked by loose threads of silk, white and sticky, and I couldn’t struggle past them and again I felt the weight on my chest and the trouble breathing, until I opened my eyes and saw a pair of disembodied eyes staring down at me from deep within a ball of white silk . . .

The lamps, though dimmed, had an unpleasant glare to them, and the walls a greenish tinge. I was in a hospital somewhere, but it was almost as bad as whatever I’d woken from. My food and drink were passed to me through a network of tubes, and I sat there, alone, imagining the fluid pumping into me and thinking back to what had happened, and what might happen next. I was in England, I knew, because the place smelled unmistakably of Dettol and every so often there was a hollow clanging, which I eventually realized was a radiator that was out of my line of sight.

I still couldn’t move. There was a window, but like everything else it only changed from white to grey to black and back again. But I was in a hospital in England, recovering. Of that I was sure.