He got exhausted and pushed through it, found new energy from somewhere, then burned that away too. He started to feel the aches from where he’d been thrown from the bus. He started to feel that he had to be absolutely weak and helpless to get where he wanted to go. That wasn’t going to be hard. He kept thinking of Jimmy, of how Sarah would be feeling now, of how he’d given Jimmy such useless things with which to protect himself, of how it didn’t feel like an investigation now, but as if they were all just children stumbling towards something terrible and huge that could pick them off when it liked. He thought of Barry Keel, that the man must have had friends, relatives, people who thought he was decent and kind and who loved him.

Was he just hurting himself? That was a deceitful, seductive thought whispering in his ear. He was harming himself in order to let himself feel better about Jimmy, in order to feel that he was working, doing something to take his mind off Jimmy’s death. No, he told himself, these were weasel words, to make him stop dancing. He needed more water. This time he ignored the thirst. He burned the doubt out of himself by keeping going. He needed to rip up all these signifiers of what he was, all these words, and find what was under them, what was real. To do that, he needed to break himself.

He kept dancing.

It began as a pain up his back and chest and into his neck, a pain he feared as the start of something serious, a stroke or heart attack. He’d been told he had to face fear to get to wherever he was going, so he embraced it, pushed at the pain, letting it rack him. He felt his teeth clench and his breath start to come in gasps, felt the air was entering him in a different way now.

He kept dancing.

The pain came properly; it was all through his body, and there were disturbances in his vision, like the start of a firework display inside his eyes.

He kept dancing. He felt a shadow fall over him. He realized he couldn’t see clearly now but he could still see the lights dancing inside his head.

Soon he didn’t know what his body was doing; he was only distantly associated with it. It would continue being alive or it wouldn’t. The pain could be ignored now, because it was only happening to that distant body.

Perhaps he was lying on the dance floor having some sort of fit. An enormous smell rushed into his head. It reminded him of childhood, but he couldn’t place it. It felt somehow like death too.

The lights in his eyes turned and resolved into one shape and locked into place.