She was standing at the back near the house on what looked like an empty champagne box. In one hand, she held a glass of wine and my first thought was that she seemed rather drunk. She was swaying slightly from side to side, splashing wine on the shoulders of the guests around her. Her speech was slurred, and it was difficult, at first, to make out what she was saying. The crowd too had started to murmur which made it even harder to hear her but after a little while, as they listened more closely to what she was saying, their voices began to die away and I could distinguish her words clearly. She was talking about me. She was talking about my head.

How come, she was shouting, she always felt so miserable when she was touching it?

How was it, that in all the hours she’d spent in the plush apartment of the mayor’s mansion, bent over my head, touching it non-stop, it had never once brought a smile to her face?

How was it that in all those weeks she’d been schlepping that huge leather bag up and down in the fancy gold elevator she’d never once gone away any more cheerful than when she’d arrived?

Surely, she shouted, if my head was so marvellous, then she, of all people, would be feeling a bit happier by now?

A silence had fallen over the courtyard. All the guests had turned to look at me; I felt all their eyes upon me.

Precious lowered her voice and I heard her say to them, wasn’t I actually just a dull Englishman with no hair? A lonely tourist with tea-cup ears and poppy-out eyes?

Wasn’t I actually just a nothing, a nobody, a useless piece of rubbish, a complete and utter waste of all their time?

I swallowed.

I whispered her name.

I stretched out my hand towards her but she didn’t move, she just stared at me, and then one of her uncles stepped forward and picked up a rock from the dusty ground of the garden and threw it at her – a swift hard blow that caught her in the throat and sent her flying off her little box like a skittle, or a coconut, and then all the other guests began to close in around her, pushing and jostling and hurling everything they had, handbags and wedding gifts and glasses of wine and bottles of champagne, branches snapped from the acacia trees and poles torn out from under the canvas bridal canopy, more rocks from the dusty ground, and when at last they had finished and dispersed there was almost nothing left of her – a single shoe, a tattered strip of fabric from her cotton dress, some scraps of ragged flesh and splintered bone.

In my dreams I save her.