No. Think. Think about it. People aren’t trapped by their own front doors, not usually. Think. Could it simply be my imagination? A manifestation of a subliminal reluctance to leave the house? But the pain in my fingers was real. Think clearly and a solution will arise. You’ll see what you’re missing.

The door had been sticking. It had been stiff to open, and sometimes I had to slam it to shut it. And now it was stuck. Either door or frame must have warped – and it had been raining non-stop since yesterday morning, maybe that contributed. For the second time I thought about firing off an email to Dave. But there was no Dave. The fury bubbled again. No one would come over, no one would sort it out, I was on my own. But if I broke the door down, if I took an axe to it, they’d take an interest then, wouldn’t they? I couldn’t, of course. This was still my home, even if it was theirs more than mine. What was the cure for a warped door? Sanding back the edge that was sticking – but the door would have to be open for that. Would WD40 loosen it? Where would I spray it, the hinges, the locks? Did I even have any? Maybe in the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen.

The kitchen. I knew what would help me assess the situation. I needed to get out of the gloomy hallway and into the only room in the flat that got any light. Happily it was also the only room with a fridge.

But it was not light in the kitchen. A fractured darkness had claimed the whole rear of the flat, and everything was terribly wrong. Where there should have been a winter morning, there was eclipse. Not night – I was not so intoxicated that I had woken in darkness and imagined it to be the day. The light was blocked out, present somewhere, but occluded.

I imagined rolling banks of fog, or smoke: the plume had reached me, I was in its eye at last, it had enveloped the house, here to choke me. That was not it, of course that was not it; but what confronted me was almost as impossible and threatening. The lime tree had come for me. Its outspread limbs had always interfered with what light made it down to the kitchen, but now the glass roof of the extension was entirely covered in a thick tangle of branches and leaves. They reached down into the garden as well, filling the small space; two days before, I had been obliged to mount the wall to touch the lowest branch, and today I could simply open the back door and lean out. It was as if the tree had vastly grown in the night, like Jack’s beanstalk; that or it had broken its moorings and crept up on the house, leaning down to peer in.