That night I went down to the fitness centre in the basement of the hotel where there was a sauna.

I remember closing my eyes and hearing the tick of the elements inside the heater. I felt ghastly. I was homesick and I wanted the certainties of my old life, but I knew there was no going back to it. I couldn’t seem to calculate how much time had passed since Jack’s disappearance. Was it weeks or days? I missed Lucius and Sarah with a terrible, physical yearning. The light in the sauna seemed unnaturally harsh.

I remember getting into the lift and going back up to my room. I remember dialling Vera’s number.

For a moment, I see my reflection in the window. Beyond it is the tower of Kazan Station. The hands of its clock advance rapidly before my eyes. The locus of my recollection shifts. I seem to be watching myself. I am watching Nicky Slopen as he answers the door; I cannot see to whom.

The continuous thread of my recollection unravels into an assortment of orphaned memories: a mouthful of gold teeth, an imperial eagle embroidered on a length of cloth, tortellini in the chiller of a supermarket, walking past the statue of Edward VII at Tooting Broadway in darkness; climbing up the creaking ladder to my loft, where under the naked bulb, accompanied by the clinks and hisses of the cold-water tank, I am sorting through the boxes of old papers in which I have saved everything: the English composition books full of murders perpetrated with implements made of ice; morose adolescent diaries (‘Frederick came over. We played D and D. I wish my penis was bigger.’); self-conscious teenage ones; and my first long essays for Ron.

My mind begins to unravel. Images of my children strobe and flicker: as they were, as they are, as I’ve never seen them. I tip headfirst into a pool of coloured mud. This is the red clay from which the biblical God made Adam. Chains of homunculi crawl along cables in an unceasing flow, fighting, laughing, dying. Beneath it all palpates a divine certainty that this is a vision of my place in creation. Life is a profound blessing. My true nature transcends a single unitary ego. Light and tenderness and compassion flood through me. I am all men and women at all times. I am all my mothers and fathers. I am Nicholas Patrick Slopen. Humour and kindness and intelligence will survive death, and God on high is full of generous laughter.

So the pain, when it comes, is a shock.

27

All my next memories are red: that was the colour of my pain; its sound was like an ambulance siren. I felt like an écorché, one of those flayed anatomical cadavers, posed in awful shapes, with bulging eyes and flesh the colour of salt beef. Every fibre of me seemed to have been exposed – a ray of light or a speck of dust could turn me inside out with agony. The contortions of my physical suffering overwhelmed my capacity to think. A few disordered impressions are all that I have of that time: a bucket containing what looked like offal in the corner of the room; a stopped clock with its hands at ten to three; someone wiping my body with a cloth so rough it seemed to be made of shagreen.

One characteristic of pain is that it roots you to the now. It’s the flipside of ecstasy – something both saints and deviants are aware of. It says something about human nature, I suppose, that more religions have chosen the flagellant’s than the voluptuary’s route to the infinite. Or maybe, as my experience suggests, pain just does it more efficiently. It takes you out of the flow of time and pins you in a transcendent present. You forget everything, you become inseparable from your agony, until you emerge from it transformed.

The pain has never entirely left me. It’s constant still, like tinnitus; but after a while –months, weeks, days? – it diminished enough for my sense of self to return and for the world around me to swim into focus.

I assumed that I’d been abducted, but if I’d disturbed the workings of a conspiracy that was important enough for my involvement to merit this, why had Hunter and Sinan left me alive at all? How had they moved me? Where was I? And, as I’ve indicated, there were more troubling inconsistencies between what I seemed to remember of my physical appearance and the body I was confronted with beneath my green hospital gown.

*

To begin with, my room was kept dark all the time. My neck seemed to lack even the necessary strength to hold my head steady: the sight of the world pitching and yawing whenever I opened my eyes made me seasick. I was fed with some kind of thick orange-flavoured fluid through a tube in my nose; it was changed twice a day by a masked orderly. The bed was made of metal tubing and it creaked when I shifted position. Bowel movements were so traumatically painful that I felt tearful at their onset.

No one ever spoke in my presence. My impression is that in this period I was attended by one individual of indeterminate gender, but since he or she always wore a gauze mask, I can’t be sure.

With hindsight, I can calculate that these events took place around the end of August 2009, but during that period day and night themselves were indistinguishable; other temporal distinctions simply collapsed. I existed in a hopeless present, a stranger in my new body.

I recall, at some point, an attendant dilating my pupils with a pocket torch. This was certainly a man, because he came so close to my face that I could see black eyebrows, brown eyes, greying hair beneath his paper cap. He had olive skin and large pores on the bridge of his nose.

Later, I was given solid food. Someone fed me with a spoon: my arms were useless. I was able to move my jaw, though the food seemed tough and intransigent. My mouth filled with something warm and salty: I had chewed through part of my own insensible tongue.

My incapacity and the lack of stimuli produced a complementary overexcitement in my mental state. My mind roamed through acres of memories. There was a terrible disconnection between my physical surroundings and the world that sprang to life every time I closed my eyes. Inside my head was a richly textured world filled with unaccountable hopefulness, longing and betrayal, and the deep greens of an English spring; outside were the scratched yellow walls of my room, tattered nylon curtains flapping at the windows, and that dusty, bright light.

*

Some time after the change in my diet, the massages began. The attendant who performed them smelled of garlic and body odour. He would raise me upright, gripping me around the chest with his huge upper arms, and then flip me over onto my stomach. He worked the soles of my feet, pummelled my legs and back; stretched out my arms and cracked the joints of my fingers. When he rotated my feet at the ankles he would wait afterwards for an answering movement from me. On a couple of occasions, my efforts earned a grunt of approbation. Finally, he would turn me back over, laying me out almost tenderly, crossing my arms over my torso before he left, as though I were a corpse he was preparing for burial.

His work produced a perceptible improvement in my vision and co-ordination. Some stage of progress was marked on the day when he hoisted me from the bed and into a vinyl wheelchair with footrests. I was naked beneath my green gown. The corridor was as featureless as my room, unrelieved by any decoration; the only sound the footsteps behind me, their rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum.

The attendant, still masked, removed my shift and lowered me into a murky-looking swimming pool. At first, he merely encouraged me to make my way, crabwise, around the perimeter. On subsequent visits, he used various apparatus – a kind of hoist; parallel bars fixed across the pool – to help me move in ways that were more conventionally human.