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Barkworth woke wet, fists wretched in rage. Thirty-five minutes he'd been on that fucking telephone. Nobody made Barkworth wait. Snooty bitch. Nobody.

Usually a bad dream would fall away from him like horrible old leaves, but even after bathing and tubing and hoovering up a kedgeree at Enderby's it still clung on. Like a slap reddened cheek, the sensation lingered. Vague on the Istanbul account, capable of blowing it, Barkworth took his leave earlier than was ordinary. Sinking down in the elevator; putting away supper in a little Thai place off Chancery Lane; horning off his shoes in the hall; pouring distractedly from the decanter; masturbating over the secrets in the nightstand drawer; subsiding reticently toward an elusive sleep. Still it clung on.

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Never the details, always the feeling. It's a subtle form of mockery that brings a man down from the inside. Great civilisations don't fall from one brash act of treachery but a thousand insidious whispers of discontent. Barkworth no longer felt well. In fact, Barkworth felt persecuted. The encroachment of the dream on his waking life, his idyll, became a thing of resentment. Each night he felt that the dream altered imperceptibly, changed by fractions its tone, shifted its weight as if sizing him up. His hair thinned and his scalp dried and the face he had once admired in the lobby mirror assumed the sagged, wrinkled complexion of a scrotum. Even his breath took on a decidedly unwholesome character, and colleagues would recoil from him with carelessly masked disgust. There was no longer comfort in his life. Or time, or space, or peace. The dream fogged around him, obscuring his vision and shortening his breath. He took more and more often to calling in sick, lying stupefied and dry-lipped amidst the stinking bedclothes.

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And now Barkworth could no longer be sure. Which was the dream and which his life?