Apparently I am. I reach out and turn the key, and suddenly the scale of things changes. It’s as if either Martin Elstree has become a giant or I’ve become a homunculus, because a door swings open in his back and I step inside into a control room. It’s like something out of Willy Wonka. On a small monitor in front of me appear the red and purple blobs of blood vessels that represent the view from inside his eyelids. A second monitor shows his dream content, but this is switched off now because he’s no longer in the Dream City but rather on the verge of wakefulness. I can pull levers and wind cranks to move Martin Elstree’s body. There is a twisting horn of an old-fashioned megaphone that I can talk into. To give him instructions.

He’s breathing fast and shallow, like he can’t catch his breath. I know that feeling. It’s how you feel when the Creeper stands on your chest and tries to choke you out. Only now I’m the Creeper.

I flick on the second monitor. Its content is determined by me. I let him dream his own flat, so that he thinks he’s awake but he isn’t.

‘One of the birds just came in,’ I whisper into the mouthpiece. ‘It’s an important message. Don’t fuck this up like you fucked up getting rid of Charlie Aaron.’

I see through his eyes as he opens them in real life. He rises out of bed, stumbles through his bedroom, across the vast open-plan main room to the balcony doors. It’s still dark out there. He tries the handle of the balcony door.

‘It’s locked, remember?’

Blearily, he punches a code into the system. I can make him do whatever I want. This is sick.

He opens the door and goes to the pigeon coop. The balcony is not large. Most of it is occupied by the pigeon coop and feed bin, but there are two chairs looking out over the river. The birds shuffle around, disturbed.

While he’s fumbling about, I suggest, ‘It’s not in the coop. It’s on the balcony railing.’

I put the dream bird there, a carrier pigeon much like Sidney with the same tiddly backpack. He makes a grab and misses; the dream bird takes wing. Then it lands on the roof of the pigeon coop, out of reach.

‘You can get it. Just put a chair by the coop.’

He’s too stupid to realise I’m doing the same thing to him that he tried to do to me. He’s clumsy and when he grabs for the chair, I change the shape of it so that its dream form is different from its real shape, and he drops it on its side. I show it to him as if it’s standing solidly on four legs.