The heat lay as heavy as a fur across my knees. I was dry, warm and floating on a cloud somewhere between sleeping and waking. I suspected I must have died and gone straight to heaven … But as my other senses began to revive, I realized that heaven could never smell like the Bristol streets on a hot summer’s day. (And if it did, I didn’t want to go there.) Nor would angels, playing their celestial harps, sound like street traders raucously vying with one another for customers. I therefore had to be at home in Small Street, in my own bedchamber, in my own bed. Why I should find this idea so strange gradually became clear to me as unwelcome memories started to return, waving at me like discoloured rags from the corners of my mind. The house at Rownham Passage … The storm … The blow to my head … The sickness and nausea … The murder of the Irishman, whose name I could no longer remember … Above all, the two women, one in brown sarcenet, the other in blue brocade, who had tried to drown me in the river … Something landed on my chest with all the force of a cartload of turnips hitting a brick wall.
