His face was almost hidden by the tangled mass of hair piled around his head and falling like another uneven flail towards the sea. His expression was unreadable. I waited for him to speak, but he stood, silent, patient, until finally I said, 'Excuse me. Please carry on.'

He said nothing for a while, gave no sign of having heard, as if there was some medium slower than air between us, then replied in a voice of surprising gentleness. 'It's my job, you know. I am employed to do this.'

I nodded. 'Oh. I see.' I waited for some further explanation.

He seemed to hear my words, again, long after I had spoken them. After a while he gave a lop-sided shrug. 'You see, once, a great emperor . . .' Then his voice died away, and he was silent for a few moments. I waited. He shook his head after a while, and shuffled round to face the curved blue horizon. I shouted, but he gave no sign of having heard.

He started to beat the waves again, muttering and cursing, quietly and monotonously.

I watched him whip at the sea for a little longer, then I turned and walked away. An iron bracelet, like the remains of some snapped manacle - I had not noticed it before - made a faint, rhythmic clinking noise on my wrist as I walked back to the ruins.

Did I really dream that? The ruined city by the sea, the man with the chain whip? I am confused for a moment; did I lie down last night and try to dream up something to tell the doctor?

In the darkness of my large, warmed bed, I feel a sort of relief. I laugh quietly, inordinately pleased with myself for having finally had a dream I can tell the good doctor with a clear conscience. I get up and pull on a dressing-gown. The apartment is cold, the grey dawn glows softly through the tall windows; a tiny, slowly pulsing light shines far out to sea, beneath a long low bank of dark cloud, as though the cloud is land, and the slowly flashing buoy a harbour's signal.

A bell sounds somewhere, far away, followed by the quieter chimes which announce the hour as five o'clock. A train whistle blows in the distance beneath, and a hardly heard, partly felt rumble witnesses the passing of a heavy-goods.

In the sitting room, I watch the grey, unmoving picture of the man in the hospital bed. The small bronze sculptures of the bridge workers, placed variously about the room, reflect the palely shining monochrome light from their rough surfaces. Suddenly a woman, a nurse, comes silently onto the screen and goes to the man's bed. I cannot see her face. She seems to be taking the fellow's temperature.

There is no sound other than a distant hiss. The nurse walks round the bed, over the shiny floor, to check the machines. She disappears again, going beneath the camera, then returns holding a small metal tray. She takes a syringe from it, draws some fluid from a little bottle, holds the needle up, then swabs the pale man's arm and injects him. I suck air through my teeth; I have never (I am sure) liked injections.

The picture is too grainy for me to see the needle actually piercing the man's skin, but in my imagination I see the slant-edged tip of the needle's tube, and the pale, soft, yielding skin ... I wince with sympathetic pain and turn the set off.

I lift the cushion off the telephone. The beeping noise is still there; maybe a little faster than it was before. I replace the receiver on the cradle. The machine rings immediately. I pick it up, but instead of the pulsing monotone:

'Ah, Orr; got you at last. That is you, isn't it?'

'Yes, Brooke, it's me.'

'Where have you been?' His voice is slurred.

'Asleep.'

'Out where? Sorry, this noise -' I can hear babbling voices in the background.

'I wasn't anywhere. I was asleep. Or rather I was -'

'Asleep?' Brooke says loudly. 'That won't do, Orr. That just won't do at all, I'm sorry. We're at Dissy Pitton's - the bar. Come over at once; we've saved you a bottle.'

'Brooke, it's the middle of the night.'

'Good grief, is it? Just as well I called.'

'The dawn is just coming up.'

'Is it?' Brooke's astonished voice goes away from the phone. I hear him shout something, then there is loud, ragged cheering. 'Hurry up then, Orr. Get a milk train or something. We'll expect you.'

'Brooke -' I begin, but then I hear Brooke talking away from the telephone again, and some distant shouting.

'Oh,' he says. 'Yes. And bring a hat; you've got to bring a -' More shouting in the background. 'Oh; it has to be a wide-brimmed hat. Have you got a wide-brimmed hat?'

'I -' I am interrupted by further shouting.

Brooke yells, 'Yes, it has to be wide-brimmed! If you haven't got a wide-brimmed hat, don't bring one that isn't. Have you got one?'

'I think so,' I say, suspecting that to say so is to commit myself to going.

'Right,' Brooke says. 'See you soon. Don't forget the hat.'

He rings off. I put the phone down, lift it again and hear the regular beeping noise once more. I look out at the slowly flashing light under the cloud bank, shrug, and head for my dressing room.

Dissy Pitton's bar lies, spread over several eccentrically arranged floors, in an unfashionable area only a few decks above train level. Directly beneath the lowest of the bars there is a rope works, where ropes and cables are wound in a series of long and narrow sheds. Accordingly, Dissy Pitton's is a place of ropes and cables, where the tables and chairs are suspended from the ceilings rather than supported by the floors. In Dissy Pitton's, as Brooke once observed in one of his rare bouts of humour, even the furniture is legless.

The doorman is asleep on his feet, leaning back against the wall of the building, arms folded and head down, peaked cap shading his eyes from the flashing neon sign over the door. He is snoring. I let myself in and climb through two dark, deserted floors to where noise and light indicate the party continues.

'Orr! The very man!' Brooke comes unsteadily through the crowd of people and the swaying maze of suspended tables, chairs, couches and screens. He steps over a snoring body on the way.

Drunks in Dissy Pitton's seldom remain under the table for long. Usually they end up sprawled on the floor in some distant part of the bar, having been tempted by the seemingly endless plane of teak floor into crawling off on all fours, driven by some deeply ingrained instinct of infantile inquisitiveness, or perhpas the desire to impersonate a slug.

'Good of you to come, Orr,' Brooke says, taking my arm. He looks at the wide-brimmed hat I am clutching. 'Nice hat.' He leads me towards a distant table.

'Yes,' I say, handing it to him. 'Who wanted it? What's it for?'

'What?' He stops; he turns the hat over in his hands. He looks, mystified, inside the crown, as though for a clue.

'You asked for a wide-brimmed hat, remember?' I tell him. 'You asked me to bring one, earlier.'

'Hmm,' Brooke says, and leads me to a table with four or five people clustered around it. I recognise Baker and Fowler, two of Brooke's fellow engineers. They are in the process of trying to stand up. Brooke still looks puzzled. He is looking closely at the hat.

'Brooke,' I say, trying not to sound exasperated. 'You asked me to bring the damn thing, not half an hour ago. You can't have forgotten.'

'You sure that was this evening?' Brooke says sceptically.

'Brooke, you rang! You invited me over here, you -'

'Oh look,' Brooke says, belching and reaching for a bottle. 'Have some wine and we'll think about it.' He shoves a glass into my hands. 'You've got some catching up to do.'

'I fear your lead is unassailable.'

'You're not upset, are you, Orr? Brooke says, pouring wine into my glass.

'Merely sober. The symptoms are similar.'