No such luck. Jostled by the train and delirious with exhaustion, he remembered hearing, or thought he’d heard, a voice coming at him in a series of waves. Fragments of a story told in a circular fashion. The tale of a father, not his own, who’d harboured a monstrous evil in his heart, and an unquenchable thirst for death. So he wasn’t alone, even in this.

Days had passed, or so it seemed, by the time he was jostled awake to find himself guided through a tall iron gate both familiar and strange. Helped by a kindly man with moss-green eyes, he was led to a wooden house with the steep roof and carved shutters of a cottage from a fairy tale. The room contained a wide bed and an armchair patterned in green and gold. A brass bowl held an array of polished stones. Amethyst, jasper, lapis lazuli, malachite. Their pleasing colours and shapes gave him comfort. Someone helped him out of his clothes and into bed, but rather than sleep, his thoughts slid free. Gliding down rivers, scaling mountains, soaring like a falcon above a dry and desolate land of ochre and umber, barren as the moon.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

When at last he woke, hours, days, or weeks later, his mind was once again clear. On the table by the bed, someone had placed a travel clock. The sight of it should have made him happy, but he felt nothing as the minutes ticked away. Time. What did it matter now?

Lying next to the clock was a faded photo. Where did it come from? He remembered the doctor handing him something as he boarded the train. A small square of cardboard. He held it in his hands and stared into the eyes of a boy in a pair of grubby trousers, cut off at the knee, squinting in the sun. No matter how many times he’d tried to vanquish that small boy, desperate to be seen, he travelled with him always. How many hours, how many years, had that boy been swimming against the tide? Asking nothing more than to be seen and heard, as he struggled to break free.

Malik looked around and recognised the room by the paintings on the wall. A seascape with sandpipers. A camel caravan shimmering in the desert. Brighter than he remembered, nearly incandescent. He counted the birds. Only nine, not the ten as he’d once believed. Or had he only dreamed the presence of the extra bird? He couldn’t recall seeing the painting in the daylight before.