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launched myself down the corridor. After four and a half paces at the maximum acceleration I could muster, I braked, laid my stockinged feet flat on the wood and locked into a slide to the far wall.
    Some twenty or thirty minutes later, the pain in my left knee and big toe had – aided I believe by a broad-ranging swear-word monologue – subsided from crippling agony to merely irksome.

    By the time I had recovered from my pratfall and unpacked my bags it was early evening. The light had yet to die in the sky but the sun was low. I made a sandwich with some cheese and salami from the fridge and opened the bottle of wine that Oskar had left for me. I ate on the sofa with the TV on BBC News 24. The rhythm and jangle of rolling global news is an odd comfort, but the flat was filled with British accents and familiar branding. The repetition of bulletins and headlines was soothingly metronomic, a lullaby more than an alert. Rolling snooze.
    I don’t know how long I slept on the sofa, or the exact time I woke, but it was night in the city outside and the room was washed with the Lucozade orange of sodium street lighting. Travel and unfamiliar places can be exhausting, and I was more tired than I had realised. One of the cats was standing on the sofa next to me, regarding me with a quizzical air.
    ‘Meow?’ it said, tilting its head to one side.
    ‘Yeah,’ I said, rising slowly to my feet and stretching. ‘You want to go out. Time for bed.’ Several joints complained as I twisted to free my watch hand from its awkward position. I was neither sitting nor lying; just sort of slumped. I must have dozed off. Struggling to my feet, I scooped the puss off the sofa and walked it over to the front door where its partner was waiting like a partygoer holding a taxi for a friend. They needed no encouragement to disappear into the night.

DAY TWO
    There is a moment between sleeping and waking where one is free. Consciousness has returned, but awareness has yet to rip away the thin screen between the waker and his surroundings, his reality. You float free of context, in no place – not sleeping, not fully awake, not at the mercy of the unknowns of the subconscious, and not yet exposed to the dull knowns of care and routine. It is at this point, between two worlds, that I think I am happiest.
    For a second, I was disoriented, uncertain of my location. I was surrounded by white, a bubble in an ocean of milk. Then, the details began to resolve. I remembered that I was in Oskar’s flat, under his white ceiling, under the peaks and troughs of his white duvet, on his white sheets and pillows.
    The regime in Iran tortures with white. Its jailers dress a prisoner in white clothes and place him in a featureless white isolation cell, filled with white light. Food – white food – is served on white paper plates, brought in by guards all in white, wearing white masks. This becomes unbearable for the prisoner, an almost-total deprivation of the senses. Snow blindness. A disconnection from the limbs, from scale and perspective – freedom from context as hell, not bliss.
    It was a perverse torment for an Islamic country. I had heard that, under Islam, perfection is the preserve of the Divine. Striving for perfection is sinful pride. Imperfections are deliberately introduced in artworks as a gesture of humility. In each of those fabulous abstract Islamic decorative patterns, there is a piously deliberate mistake, a flawed iteration.
    How those prisoners must crave that imperfection. A mark on the wall, a shadowed crevice, a stained ceiling tile. Apparently it is enough to unhinge the mind – enough to make one do anything to escape that featureless room.
    ‘Why do they dislike me?’
    ‘Oh, Oskar, they...’
    I wanted to say:
Oskar, they don’t really dislike you, they just don’t really like you, you’re not like them, and you’re not an easy person to like
. I didn’t say that.
    ‘...What sort of question is that?’ I said at last.