But it was someone else of course, someone I had never seen before, someone who didn’t even stop, but just walked past me with a polite nod.

Miranda said something to me, I didn’t hear what it was, the music was loud now. I was just going to ask her to repeat it when there was a movement inside me, a push or a kick. Automatically I pressed my hand against my stomach. Another push now, against my hand, very clear. It was as if we were giving each other a high five, and I wanted to tell someone-no, not someone, I wanted to tell Johannes, I wanted to tell Johannes and no one else that I had just done a high five with our baby. I wanted to take his hand and place it on my stomach, feel the warmth of his hand, let him feel the movements of our child. Let him say hello to his baby.

I could see that Miranda was saying something else, closer now, right next to me. She looked troubled, I thought, but I still couldn’t hear what she was saying, and suddenly I didn’t know how to open my mouth and speak. I must have looked like an idiot, staring at her vacantly and stupidly, as if I suddenly had no idea who she was. But the baby was somehow pressing on my bladder, because all of a sudden I was desperate for a pee, and I came to my senses, smiled apologetically at Miranda, and said:

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“Don’t you feel well?” she almost shouted.

“I’m fine, it’s just… It’s just… it’s this song, it… Old memories, you know.”

She nodded.

“Do you feel like dancing?” she asked.

“Sure. But I have to go the bathroom first,” I replied. “I’m bursting. Back soon, I won’t be long!”

I pushed my way through the sea of happy party people, residents and staff mixing together; many well-known faces, roughly the same number vaguely familiar, and a small number completely unknown, I said hi and nodded and waved to the left and the right and soon I had reached the toilets at the far end of the room: a row of doors with people going in and out. Voices rumbling and roaring, laughing and shouting, music pulsating from the main room: “This is for my girl, this is for my woman, for my world. Baby, baby, this is all for you…”

The baby must have taken its foot off my bladder-or moved its bottom or head or elbow-because the pressure had gone and suddenly I didn’t need to go to the bathroom at all. Perhaps that was why I now noticed three extra doors at the end without the toilet symbol on them. These three were a bit smaller and looked more like some kind of decoration, a kind of fake door rather than real doors. There were no signs on them, no handles, and it was only when I-sauntering up and down in front of the doors in an attempt to look as if I were desperate to pee-got really close that I saw the narrow metal-framed slot in the door frame.

Without thinking-as if I were on autopilot, simply functioning, simply acting, like a robot-I took the key card out of my pocket and swiped it through the slot as if in passing. A small gap in the door frame immediately slid open, revealing a keypad not much bigger than that of a cell phone. In a state that can best be described as a panic-stricken trance, I keyed in 98 44, pushed open the door, stepped over the threshold and onto the other side, and before I gave myself time to see or register where I had ended up, I grabbed the handle on my side of the door and pushed it firmly shut.

It was incredibly bright. I was bathed in a white, harsh neon light and a silence so complete that my own heart sounded like thunderclaps recorded on a loop and played back at a very high speed. It took a little while, I don’t know how long, seconds or minutes, before I was able to see in the cold light. And when I finally saw that I was on a landing in a stairwell, exactly as the person I call Birthmark had explained, my feelings caught up with me. Panic grabbed hold and penetrated my body and raced through my veins and arteries, rushing and roaring right through me.

Up or down? I thought feverishly, shrugged my shoulders and started to run upstairs; the party room was on K1, and should therefore be below ground level. It was only when I had gone up a couple of floors that I remembered my experience in the break room in the surgical department, where there had been a window facing onto the outside world despite the fact that it was located on what was called the basement level.

So I turned and ran downstairs instead, two floors, three, then down another half staircase which came to a stop at another door, a substantial door made of metal. This time the slot wasn’t hidden in the door frame, but was on the wall next to it, in full view and with a keypad similar to the ones you find in stores for customers to key in their debit pin number.

With my hand shaking-shaking and sweating-I swiped the card, my other hand hovering over the keypad, ready, and-oh no! It was as if the code had been completely wiped out of my memory, the code was-yes, that was it, I remembered, keyed in 94 88. But nothing happened, there was no click. I pushed down the handle anyway, but the door was locked, obviously.

I tried again: 99 48-no.

48 99 then? No.

There was something wrong with those four numbers, they were right but yet they were wrong. My whole body was shaking now, sweat pouring down my back, my mouth was dry and I was on the verge of tears, almost hysterical, my head was spinning-when that trivial refrain suddenly echoed through my brain and stopped the spinning:

This is for my girl, this is for my woman, for my world. Baby, baby, this is all for you…

All at once I was perfectly calm, perfectly clear, and firmly keyed in the combination 98 44, whereupon the door obediently gave a faint click and I pressed down the handle, pushed open the heavy door, walked out, took two steps, and the metal door closed behind me.

I was out. Outside. There was a breeze, that was the first thing I noticed. I could feel it against my face, I could feel it in my hair, lifting it and messing it up. I could feel it making the legs of my pants flap loosely against my calves. It was almost dark; the sun was drawing its last burning threads from a part of the sky that was already dark and full of stars, toward a still-glowing strip on the opposite side. It wasn’t cold, but it was very cool; the night was likely to be quite chilly.

I stood there for a moment just outside the door, watching the wind run its invisible fingers through the leaves on the trees, making the flowers on the lilac bushes nod and bow and the birch trees rustle and whisper. I was in a park. There were lawns and gravel paths; one of the paths led to the left, around the corner of the building. Beyond the corner there was, from my point of view, only darkness. A little way ahead of me, over to the right, I could just see a pond among some low bushes. Tall trees towered up behind the pond, their huge crowns swaying. It was the same pond I had seen from the window of the break room that day in February. My first impulse was to run over there, to get behind the bushes and in among the trees, and to hide myself somewhere. But I realized at once that if there were surveillance cameras out here, which seemed likely, and if anyone saw me running, that would attract attention. It would look suspicious, because why would a staff member run out of the workplace and in among the bushes to hide? No, that would be silly, I reasoned, the only sensible thing I could do was to follow the path around the corner. So that’s what I did.

The gravel crunched beneath my feet-deafeningly, it seemed to me-and I expected to hear running footsteps behind me at any moment, to be escorted back into the building by a couple of strong guards, or for a patrol of some kind to be waiting around the bend. But nobody came running and no patrol was waiting. When I got around the corner I saw instead, in the romantic, ghostly atmosphere of the twilight, with its mixture of evening sun and darkness, heightened here by the glow of the streetlamps, that the path led over a patch of grass to a low white wooden fence with an open gate in it. I walked the twenty yards or so to the fence which was ridiculously low, hardly up to my knees; the open gate was completely superfluous, but as the path led to the gate I went out through it anyway, and found myself on a road that was illuminated for fifty yards or so in each direction.