‘I’m done!’ he wheezed, eyes streaming, followed by yet more frenzied sneezing.

I stood up and went into the bathroom to get him some toilet tissue (Mrs Meadows had absconded with my hanky, remember?). I returned and handed it over to him. His nose seemed to be …

I started to question whether I was actually awake – sentient. Was this all just a …? I blinked.

‘Is he here?’ Clifford demanded (between sneezes).

‘Who?’

‘Eric Morecambe! Richard bloody Burton!’ he yelled. ‘Who the hell d’you think I mean?’

‘Mr Huff?’ I hazarded a guess.

‘Mr Huff!’ He sneezed. And a series of … I can only describe them as …

‘No!’ I exclaimed, horrified. ‘He’s in Berkshire, at Douai. The abbey. At the monastery.’

Then I watched – we both watched – in complete amazement, as line after line of … This will seem perfectly demented, I know, but line after line of thin, black typescript started to run out of his nose. In sentences. Properly punctuated. It flooded out of his nose. And when he sneezed, whole paragraphs came spraying out of his throat. Some words and letters stuck briefly to his hands and to the walls and the furniture. Some floated in the air and then simply evaporated. I couldn’t read most of them but I was sure I saw …

‘I mean I can’t speak for you, obviously, but I know I’m totally insignificant – just a minor character …’

‘I’m far too tall to be hanging myself for one thing. It’d be too difficult to arrange …’

‘He was married to the photographer! Why didn’t I know that? I mean if I knew about the parrot …?’

‘But like I said earlier, the seat belt wasn’t faulty! It was a lie! I lied!’

‘I made a silent pact with God as I screamed her name into the black, surging abyss …’

‘Carla! Carla! Carla! Carla!’

Clifford caught a couple of the ‘Carlas’ in his hand (like moths), crushed them and then wiped his palm on the front of his jumper. After a couple of minutes the words trickled out more slowly, in half-sentences and exclamations. A few seconds and then … then they dried up completely and were gone. Clifford was just … just Clifford again, wiping his nose with the toilet paper.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked (what else could I possibly say?).

‘Uh … No. I should probably get on the phone and tell everybody that you’re not … that you’re still …’

He stepped forward and then staggered slightly. I sprang over to support him, held on to his arm and guided him down on to the chair.

‘I feel drained,’ he murmured, rubbing his forehead, ‘but weirdly …’ He frowned, slightly dazed, struggling to find the right word … ‘In … inart … inartic … inart …’

But the word wouldn’t come. Nothing came. So he just shrugged, reached into his pocket, withdrew the little Russian minaret from inside it, placed it down on to the arm of the chair, then gazed at it, half smiling, every once in a while slowly shaking his giant head, resignedly.