The big heavy kitbag was lying right behind the giant plastic bin full of sharps.

To this day I don’t know exactly what made me react the way I did. I started to cry out, then somehow knew that there was no time, and pulled my fiancée to the side, throwing her down towards the wall and trying to throw myself on top of her.

That is all I can claim to remember.

The young soldier was a CT, a suicide bomber. The kitbag contained a blast bomb. The explosive charge it held could be made larger than it would have been otherwise because it required no shrapnel; the transparent bin provided that.

Thirty-eight died, not counting the bomber. Both border control gate officials perished, as did the policeman who had been on his way to find out what was happening. Everybody ahead of us in the queue died instantly or within seconds, save for one baby asleep in a backpack cradle. For three or four metres behind where we had been standing, almost everybody died. My fiancée lived for five days. I was on the critical list for about the same amount of time and in intensive care for a further month. I had lost my left eye and left leg and both eardrums.

What I thought most tragic and somehow hopeless was that the young CT suicide bomber had not murdered a real soldier for his uniform or even just stolen it; he really was an army draftee, and one who had come from a good, well-off, well-educated family of unquestionable loyalty and social credentials and who had passed all the relevant weeding-out stages and psychological tests with flying colours. He had only converted to Christianity, in secret, a few months earlier. A kind of conclusive despair settled within me when I learned that, and I had not, being quite frank about it, been in the best of spirits beforehand.

I was in a private room at the hospital, still in some pain a couple of weeks after leaving the Intensive suite, when a lady came to see me while I was snoozing. I got the impression of a short, bustily attractive woman, well dressed and strongly perfumed. I didn’t recognise her, and wondered – a little groggily due to the painkillers – if she was one of my ex-subjects, arrived to inflict a bruise upon a bruise. She held my wrist as though about to take my pulse, then encircled it, her hand a bracelet, and with that, and no further ceremony, suddenly I was somewhere else.

My new friend Adrian insists that he must be personally present to be of the most help, so is on his way. However, it will take most of the rest of the day for him to get here.

I wander the abandoned palace for a while, imprisoned within all this luxury and space, reluctant to show signs of life in case anybody is watching and equally reticent about leaving it. I feel safe here, even as I fret at the feeling of confinement and the prospect of presenting an unmoving target for the next five or six hours. I stand looking at a walk-in freezer on the ground floor. The freezer is switched off, dark, dry, its thick, stepped door wedged open by a shrink-wrapped case of Coca-Cola. I shiver, suddenly remembering the time I came here when it snowed, when I met my little pirate captain, and the very first time I came to this world, when I tasted its unique fragre.

During the initial moments of that original visit, knowing nothing of the place save for that first hint of its true essence, I’d happily have bet somebody else’s bottom dollar this was a Greedist world, a world where the untrammelled pursuit of material wealth and the virtues of money itself were extolled, venerated and even worshipped. Not as an original act of faith of course; we always give ourselves more credit than that. Accidentally, rather. Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.

I claim no moral superiority here. People like me get to see this more clearly than most only because we are privileged to witness lots of non-unique examples spread across a variety of worlds, not because we are intrinsically wiser or more ethically refined. And even I – knowing full well that the technicalities profoundly matter – have to accept that it is precisely from the details, from the clutter and the turmoil of existence, that the fatal blow inescapably arises, like a freak wave, overwhelming, from the distributed chaos of the ocean.

The specifics will claim me one day; the details always deliver in the end.

There are as many types of capitalism as there are types of socialism – or any other ism for that matter – but one of the major differences – a major difference founded on what appears to be a minor detail – between whole bundles of ostensibly fully capitalist societies centres (indeed, depends) on whether commerce is governed by private firms and partnerships, or by limited companies.

I’d lie if I claimed I possessed any congenital interest in economics, but – from what I’ve gathered over the years – the invention and acceptance of the limited company means people can take big risks with money not their own and then – if it all goes wrong – lets them just walk away from the resulting debts, because the company is somehow regarded as being like a person in its own right, so that its debts die with it (not the sort of fairy story a partnership is allowed to get away with).

It’s a piece of nonsense, really, and I used to wonder that legislatures anywhere bought into this blatant fantasy and agreed to give it legal house room. But that was just me being naive, before I realised that there was a reason why it always dawned on all those ambitious, powerful gents in all those various legislatures that this ludicrous hooey might actually be quite a good idea.

Anyway, limited company worlds often progress faster than other types, but always less smoothly and reliably, and sometimes disastrously. I’ve looked into it and frankly it just isn’t worth it, but you can’t tell that to anyone caught up within the seductive madness of the dream; they have the faith, and are forever relieved by the invisible hand.

I kick the case of Coca-Cola aside, letting the freezer door thud closed.

There is a generously sized kitchen in the Palazzo. It also has no electricity, of course, and no other sort of power I can get to work, but it does have drawers full of cutlery and cupboards full of tin cans. I eat cold peas by candlelight.

As I begin to relax, I discover a need to know how many peas are on the spoon I am eating with. Oh dear. I thought I’d shaken that weakness off.

I try to ignore this absurd compulsion and just keep on eating, but it is as though there is an elastic band joining the plate and the spoon, or a membrane in front of my face, physically preventing me from bringing the spoon to my mouth. Preposterous as it may be, it is actually easier to give in and count the peas. I cannot arrive at an accurate figure just staring at the slowly collapsing pile on the spoon, of course (though I’m sure an estimate would be pretty close to the final figure), so I have to spoon the load onto the plate and count them there. In the dim glow of the single candle, this is harder than it sounds. I have to sort them into files of five to ensure accuracy. Having arrived at a figure it proves impossible to pick all the peas up again. I push them back into the mass of peas on the plate and take up another spoonful. That first spoonful was a pretty typical one, I reckon. This one poised before me now is also pretty typical, so ought to have the same number of peas.

But does it? I am growing annoyed at myself and my stomach is growling at me, still mostly empty, but I need to know. Was that first spoonful typical? Did I arrive at a reliable number before? I let this latest sample slide onto the side of the plate and count them as well. Slightly more than the first spoonful. I take an average of the two. Though even as I do this I realise that two just seems an inadequate number. One more sample ought to do it. Three is the number required for triangulation, after all.