It is late afternoon, hot and sultry. Heat has soaked into the walls of the house, into my bones, and I know that tomorrow I will be wandering around an air-conditioned office feeling like a human radiator.

Familiar sounds float in through my always-open windows: birds, palm trees rustling in the slight wind, the chirruping of small insects. A bird flits by the balcony, gone too quickly and too suddenly for me to make out its colours and markings.

Of late, my sleep has been crowded with dreams. Faces, both familiar and unfamiliar, far and near, loom large in my mind's eye. There is noise, voices, perhaps. I can never recall the full details, but the result is always the same -

I wake with a violent start and stare for a time around my darkened room, at the square patterns of the windows against the street light outside. I listen to the whirring of the fan above me, my heart going at some impossible frequency, my fingers tracing meaningless lines into the duvet beneath me. I wait for sleep to come again, discomfited and shaken.

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