After a night of broken sleep and anxious dreams that were hard to tell apart from waking thoughts, Stephen had slept through the screech of his alarm clock and had to rush to get to work. In a dream that seemed to repeat itself with variations on a constant loop like a demonic piece of music, he had been a witness to successive acts of violence and each time found himself unable to make the necessary 999 call that would bring the outrage to a stop. A man in a mask was skewering a woman with a metal rod, a man held a gun to a baby’s head and Stephen, standing right beside a telephone, could not force his index finger into the correct number on the dial. Or, having inserted a finger, could not rotate the dial. Or, although on a fully working telephone, accurately sequence the essential numbers. Or remember what the numbers were. His head was thick with fitful waking and yesterday evening’s gin, his stomach gassy from the food he’d eaten. There were delays on the Central Line and his train was packed.
