I wake up, suddenly, in a cold sweat. 4004! I roll over. 4004! I throw out my arm and feel blindly for a pen or a crayon or a stub of pencil on my bedside table. I am sleepy – clumsy – knock over the alarm clock, almost up-end a glass of water, hear my wristwatch go flying. But I quickly locate a felt-tip and pull off the lid. Paper. Uh …Uh …

I turn, automatically, towards the wall next to my bed, reach out to touch it and prepare to write on it, but there is a poster, one of my new, Russian Propagandist collection, recently hung …

Uh …

4004! I quickly scribble the four digits on to the soft skin inside my arm and then – overwrought, exhausted – lie there, shivering, as the poster (its supporting balls of Blu-Tack disturbed by my blindly grappling hands) suddenly drops from the wall, half on to the floor, half over the bed and sets my heart frantically pounding. Oh God. What did she mean? ‘It is time, meine Carla?’ My skin starts to crawl. I attempt to distract myself by guiltily pondering the apology which I really should have made to Mr Huff – which I fully intended to make – which I really wanted to make – but which I never actually … never actually … somehow … never actually somehow quite got around to … uh …

‘It is time?’

Time for what, exactly?

There just never seemed an appropriate moment. Can there ever be an appropriate moment to gently alert a person to the fact that you knowingly – calculatingly – hid a rotting shark in a suitcase beneath their bed? Out of pure spite? Pure bile? No. No. No. No. Probably not.

I tried to be nice, though, didn’t I? Took the pie? I was full to the brim – bursting! – with good intentions. But the smell of eucalyptus. Orla’s smell. And the way he devoured the thing – slice after slice. Hacked into it with the bread knife. Bolted it down – almost vengefully – like a spiteful baboon cannibalizing the live young of a weaker species, all grabbing hands and gnashing teeth and flashing, bloodshot eyes.

Unsettling.

Poignant.

Unsettling.

What was that other thing she’d said? Orla? About gathering? Gathering the leaves together? The leaves?

Oh why has this all become so complicated?! Why couldn’t we just be … I don’t know … civil? Why all the mischief and the rancour and the game playing? If he’d only just … if he’d just approached me, cordially, from the off, explained himself – the project, in detail.

Yes.

I’d have run a mile.

Oh God!

A mile.

Is it possible – vaguely, even remotely possible – that he wasn’t ever actually interested in my account of events? Like Alys said? That my feelings of guilt may have exacerbated – inflated – my sense of my own significance? I mean it’s not entirely beyond the bounds of …