The crouching was making him uncomfortably aware of the sandwich, the banana, the orange and, in particular, the Mars bar. He did not want to throw up again, and in a hotel to boot. So, keeping his eyes closed, he forced himself to his feet and strode back and forth between the window and the door, hoping to repeat the calming effect of the afternoon’s walk. By the time he had done this two hundred times the rhythm was going some way to alleviating the panic.

This, however, was the point at which he heard water lapping on a tiled floor. It took him several seconds to work out what might be making the sound of water lapping on a tile floor. When he did so he opened his eyes and sprinted toward the bathroom, tripping on the corner of the bed and smacking his head against the door frame.

He got to his feet and stumbled into the darkness of the bathroom, slowing down to prevent himself slipping again on the flooded floor. He turned the taps off, threw all the available towels onto the ground, gently removed the plug then knelt beside the toilet to get his breath back.

The pain in his head was considerable, but it brought some relief, being a more everyday kind of pain that peaked and ebbed in a predictable fashion.

He put his hand to his forehead. It was warm and wet. He really did not want to open his eyes to find out whether this was due to blood or bathwater.

He flipped the door closed behind him with his foot so that the darkness thickened.

Fuzzy pink lights hovered on the back of his eyelids like a distant goblin village.

He did not need this. Not today, of all days.

When he had got his breath back he clambered slowly to his feet and made his way into the bedroom, keeping his eyes tightly closed. He turned the lights off and put his clothes back on. Opening his eyes, he removed a selection of cans, bottles and snacks from the minibar and returned to the chair in front of the television. He opened a can of Carlsberg, found the music video channel and waited for more pneumatically breasted, gyrating women in the hope that they might stimulate a sexual fantasy gripping enough for him to forget where he was, and who he was, and what had happened to him over the last twelve hours.

He ate a Snickers.

He felt like a small child after a long, long day. He wanted someone bigger and stronger to carry him to a warm bed where he could fall into a deep sleep and be transported swiftly to the beginning of a new morning in which everything would be good and clean and simple again.

The woman singing on the television looked about twelve years old. She had no breasts to speak of and was wearing jeans and a torn T-shirt. There would have been something unsavory about watching her if she did not seem so terribly angry bouncing up to the camera every few bars to shout into the lens. She reminded George of a younger Katie in one of her more volatile moods.

The music was raucous and tuneless, but as the drink began to do its work, he realized how young people, possibly drunk themselves, or under the influence of mind-altering drugs, could find it entertaining. The driving rhythm, the simple melody. Like watching a lightning storm from the safety of one’s living room. The idea that there was something even more violent happening outside one’s head.

The young woman was followed by two black men chanting over an insistent disco beat. They were wearing baggy trousers and baseball caps and using some kind of impenetrable ghetto slang. On the surface they seemed a lot less angry than the young woman in the previous video, but they gave the very definite impression that, unlike the angry young woman, they would not think twice about burgling your house.

They had three female backing singers who were wearing very little clothing indeed.

He opened a small bottle of vodka.

By midnight he had drunk himself into a stupor and was wondering why he had not done so earlier. He felt very relaxed and kept forgetting where he was. Which was good.

He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, staggered back to the bedroom and collapsed onto the eiderdown. His brain felt emptier than it had done at any time in the past few months. The thought occurred to him that he could become an alcoholic. And at this precise moment it seemed a not unreasonable solution to his problems.

Then he passed into unconsciousness.

In the middle of the night he found himself making a final descent into an airport. Heathrow, possibly. Or Charles de Gaulle. He was in a plane which also happened to be a helicopter and the woman sitting next to him was carrying a lapdog, which didn’t happen on real planes.

He felt oddly serene. Indeed, the plane, or helicopter, felt like the arms of that bigger, stronger person he had previously imagined carrying him to bed.

He looked out of the window into the darkness. The view was breathtakingly beautiful, the traffic far below pulsing like lava in the cracks of a great black stone.

There was music playing, either in his head or on the complimentary headphones, something lush and orchestral and infinitely calming. And the check pattern on the woven cover of the seat in front of him was rippling slightly, like little waves bouncing off a harbor wall and intersecting with themselves to create a shimmering grid of wet sunlight.

Then the plane, or helicopter, hit something.

There was an almighty bang and everything moved several yards sideways. This was followed by a second of stunned silence. Then the plane veered downward to the right and people were screaming and the air was suddenly full of food and hand luggage and the little dog was airborne, like a balloon on the end of its lead.

George tried desperately to unclip his seat belt but his fingers were mitteny and numb and refused to obey his commands and he was looking through the tiny Plexiglas porthole at burning aviation fuel and thick black smoke pouring from the underside of the right-hand wing.

Suddenly the roof of the plane was ripped back like the lid of a sardine tin and a monstrous wind began cartwheeling small children and cabin crew out into the dark.

A drinks trolley danced down the aisle and tore the head off a man sitting to George’s left.

Then he wasn’t in the plane anymore. He was sledging down Lunn Hill with Brian. He was helping Jean extract the heel of her shoe from a grating in Florence. He was standing up in Mrs. Amery’s class trying to spell parallel over and over again with everyone laughing at him.

Then he was back inside the plane, and simultaneously standing in his own back garden in the middle of the night, looking up at the bedroom and wondering what was causing that odd grunting noise coming from inside, when the exterior of the house was lit up by a fierce orange light, and he turned and saw it coming in, like a tidal wave of wreckage, but airborne, lit by the gasoline meteor at its center.

The ground shook. A shopfront was spattered with gallons of hot black plastic. A reclining seat bounced down a residential street on a peacock’s tail of white sparks. A human hand fell onto a roundabout in a children’s playground.

The nose cone plowed into a multistory car park and George woke to find himself in sodden clothing on a large bed in a room he did not recognize with the taste of sick in his mouth, a pain like a metal spike driven into the side of his head and the knowledge that the dream had not ended, that he was still out there, falling through the night, desperate for that final impact which would put the lights out for good.