‘Charlie! Wake up!’

The lift is sitting on the 27th floor refusing to move and I’m on the eighth.

‘Don’t think . . . I’ll make it out . . .’ I spot a laundry cart full of sheets.

Now, let me make it clear that under normal circumstances I would never be tempted to curl up in a pile of sheets potentially loaded with other people’s body fluids, bacteria and stray pubic hair. But when I’ve been working, I become quite unable to control some of my primitive instincts. Right now the need for sleep is overpowering. I have to get somewhere safe and cosy before I pass out, and suddenly those sheets are looking too inviting to resist. I wonder if this is how dogs feel about lamp posts.

‘Eighth floor,’ I tell O. ‘Laundry cart near the lift.’

Then I climb in. Last thing I notice is how the dirty sheets smell like Chanel Number 5.

Secret Diary of a Prawn Star

Entry #48

Codename: Chaplin

Date: 13 September 2027

Client: N/A

Payment in advance: N/A

Session Goal: Find a way to wake myself up

Location: Laundry cart, 8th floor, Trump Metropole

Narcolepsy status: CRITICAL

Nutrition/stimulants: Fear

Start time: 3.28 a.m.

End time: 5.47 a.m.

Before I got sick there was no particular order to my dreams. When I could remember them, they were set in my mum’s house, or school, or sometimes in a mall or a friend’s place. Or maybe a car. They were a lot like real life, although things were stitched together in funny ways, of course, and nothing made much sense.

But during my narcolepsy days, I started visiting the Dream City on a regular basis. Usually I’m looking for something there, but I can never remember what.

The Dream City isn’t anything like real London unless you count the Square Mile – and then only in that both are full of swerves and unexpected openings. Making your way around it is like playing a video game where the designers are having a laugh at your expense. There’s no map of it, no overview, and very little concession to reality. Streets can turn into canals and canals into bridges, and occasionally roads go around corners that are greater than 360 degrees with no apology. Yet somehow it all holds together.

For architectural chutzpah, the Dream City is like Singapore. Showy, extravagantly futuristic. There are neon bridges connecting the tops of buildings. There are fleets of cyclists riding point to point in transparent tubes. But when you explore on foot you find old parts underneath: mossy cloisters of pitted stone with broken statues, canals that smell like ditchwater and plunge unexpectedly underground. You can ride through these dark tunnels poled by animal gondoliers who use recycled smartphones to light the way.

If you look, you can find railway-siding houses with piles of junk rotting in their back gardens, just like in real London. But the back gardens in the Dream City are overshadowed by mysterious honeycomb towers whose structure looks like a cross section of bone under a high-powered microscope.