2048

‘It’s thirteen o’clock,’ the dog says to the man.

Watery light falls from a small, high window disclosing rough-grained concrete walls, a rail with a few grey t-shirts hanging damply, a scuffed plastic table and on the bare floor, the thin mattress with its solo occupant.

The man is young, slender-hipped and narrow-shouldered. His small hands and feet are sensitively sculpted, like those of angels on a tomb. His body is innocent of wear, excess or injury: no reservoirs of fat, no shadows, scuffs or blemishes. Lying half-shrouded in a single sheet, washed by weak light, he could be freshly born.

‘It’s thirteen o’clock, Don,’ repeats the dog.

Donald reaches blindly for the glasses that lie unfolded on the bed stand beside him. At the approach of his hand they emit a pale glow, the lenses shimmering with petals of light. Raising them to his face, he positions them one-handed in a long-accustomed action. He looks through the light to see the dog standing at his feet, energetically wagging its green, purple-tipped tail.

The dog is small: about the size of a terrier, with alert, pointed ears, a snub-nose, large, wide, liquid-blue eyes, a stocky body and enormous paws, which float disconcertingly a few inches above the floor. Donald twitches his head. The image of the dog shimmers and vanishes for a moment while the gyro in his iyes resets, then reappears, rooted satisfyingly in place, along with the rest of the scene.

Ahead of Donald in place of the concrete wall, a large window overlooks a spreading jumble of pitched tiled roofs, chimneys and church spires. Columns of twisting purple smoke rise artfully, undisturbed by wind, to a kaleidoscopic sky that combines the most pleasingly psychedelic potential of both dawn and dusk.

Inside the room, the walls are decorated with pale blue and silver silk wallpaper in a fleur-de-lys pattern. The ceiling, high and vaulted, is open to a sky of roiling cotton-wool clouds, on which recline fat cherubs tending to a hareem of naked deities, sighing and stretching to admire themselves and each other. Donald stares up at them idly.

‘OK,’ he says, slowly sitting up. He rests his forearms on his knees. ‘OK,’ he says again, exhales and is on his feet. He approaches the window. In the distance there is a tiny electric flash of green. He watches it blink on and off, like a firefly. It resolves itself into the tip of the wing of a green parakeet, catching the low sun. Joined now by the rest of a small flock, the half-dozen birds wheel and dip over the roofs like leaves in the wind.

Rising, falling, they eddy closer, retreat, then approach again until suddenly they are almost on him; a hockey-stick turn at the last moment and he is left exhilarated; the impression of pale ventral feathers, bright black eyes and blood-red bills persisting like a glance at the sun.

‘Donald,’ says the dog, ‘before we go walkies I suggest that we defecate.’