I was in the corridor before I had the least idea where I was going. The face had hardly bothered to resemble Bella’s – just enough to let me know she could turn up wherever she chose. There was no point in trying to sleep on the couch – she could find me there quite as readily – and so I fell into a chair, which at least had its back to the wall. I tried not to think that the intruder could seep through the bricks or otherwise reappear. The remote control of the television found me a comedy even more monochrome than the night outside the window, but I was distracted from the elegant antics of the wealthy characters, so prosperous in the midst of the depression that they might have been inhabiting a fairy tale, by an incomplete but vigorous figure that kept prancing less than wholly into sight behind them. Was I glimpsing the reflection of a visitor flattened like a cut-out or an insect on the wall beside me? Before long the sideways jerking of my head revived the ache in my neck, and I yielded to closing my eyes. I had a hopeless notion that unawareness couldn’t leave me any more at risk than awareness would.

I awoke whenever I nodded, unless slumber sometimes dragged me too deep. Apparently the channel was broadcasting an all-night marathon of comedies, because I kept catching fragments where different performers were enacting similar routines, all of which felt like a joke at my expense. Some of the soundtracks were so worn that whispers seemed to lurk behind the dialogue, and more than once I lurched awake with a sense that somebody had spoken close to me. One thought masqueraded as reassurance: that when day came I should go to my office at the university. It felt like a remote promise of the dawn.

At last the world outside the window grew as grey as the onscreen film, and eventually regained colours – red roofs, blue sea and bluer sky. Switching off the television, I headed for the bathroom, where I stood in the bath and backed away from the shower so as not to be chilled by the initial rush of water. Despite the August day, I felt cold, still more so when a red-hot needle jabbed my shin. It was a splash of scalding water from the shower.