My eyes closed. If only I could sleep. I mean, really sleep, for a night and a day and another night. I dozed, and I dreamed for a long, suspended moment that I was back in Brighton, walking down the sharply-angled suburban streets of Preston Park, between red-bricked Edwardian terraces, under a gray photographic sky. I dreamed that I saw someone scuttling from the steps of my basement flat, someone tall and long-legged, someone who turned round to stare at me once with a pointed white face, and then hurried away. The Long Red-Legged Scissorman, somebody whispered in my ear. He's real!I tried to run after him, but somehow he had managed to make his way into the park, behind the high cast-iron railings. Livid green grass; peacocks crying like abused children. All I could do was run parallel to him on the other side of the railings, hoping that he would still be in sight when I eventually came to a gate.
My breath sounded thunderous. My feet slapped, clownish, on the tarmac path. I saw inflated faces bobbing past me, white balloons with human smiles. I heard a scratching, scuffling noise, too, as if a dog were following close behind me, its claws clicking on the path. I turned around, twisted around in the quilt, and suddenly I was awake and I heard a furious, noisy scuttling, much louder than a squirrel or a bird.
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