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was manly and honourable or just fake as well, because at the same time as I was digging I was imagining telling people about it. I was imagining them thinking about my physical strength and my decisiveness, but in fact it was much harder work than I had expected. At the beginning I thought I wasn’t going to be able to do it. Yet I knew there was absolutely no way I could give up. I could see how it would look in daylight, me sitting there with a dead dog and a half-dug mess in the garden. The ground was incredibly hard and the spade kept hitting rocks and the hole had to be pretty big to fit Pilot in it. Once or twice I thought I was going to have to admit defeat. Yet after awhile,’ he said, ‘I started to feel that this actually was what it was like to be a man. I realised that I felt anger, and that it was anger that was giving me the strength to do it and so I let myself get angrier and angrier until in the end I wasn’t even afraid of what the family would say because they hadn’t had to kill the dog and then dig this hole to bury him in. One of the phrases my wife had started to use when we argued about the way she ran things was: “You weren’t here”. I always hated it, but now I could imagine saying it back to her. I realised how angry she must have been to say it and suddenly I was glad that Pilot was dead. I was actually glad, because it felt like without him we were going to have to admit what we truly felt.’
    He paused, an expression of bewilderment on his face.
    â€˜I finished digging the hole,’ he went on after a while, ‘and I went back into the house and I wrapped Pilot in a blanket. I picked him up from his bed and he was so unbelievably heavy I almost dropped him. It would have been easier to drag him,’ he said, ‘but I knew I couldn’t let myself do that because I was already starting to become frightened of the body. When I went back into the house and saw him lying there dead,’ he said, ‘I had the most unbelievable urge to run away. I had to believe it was still Pilot,’ he said, ‘or I couldn’t have gone through with it. Inthe end I had to hold him right against my chest,’ he said, ‘and even then I managed to bang his head on the door frame on my way out, and I was talking to him and apologising to him out loud and somehow I staggered outside with him and got him across the garden and put him in the hole. It was starting to get light. I arranged him all nicely, then I went back inside and got some of his things from his bed and put them down there with him. Then I filled the hole with earth and tided it and marked the edges with stones. Then I went and packed my bag and had a shower. I was absolutely filthy,’ he said. ‘I had to throw away my shirt. Then I got in the car and drove to the airport.’
    He spread out his large hands in front of him and examined them back and front. They were clean, except for the dark, compacted half-moons of dirt under the nails. He looked at me.
    â€˜The only thing I couldn’t get out was the mud under my fingernails,’ he said.
    *
‘The hotel was completely round…’
    The hotel was completely round: it had at one time been a water tower, the receptionist said, and the repurposing of the building had won the architect many prizes. She gave me a map of the city, smoothing it out across the reception desk with slender, highly varnished fingernails.
    â€˜We are here,’ she said, circling the spot with a pen.
    In the lobby a number of thick pillars ascended through the core of the building, from which walkways extended overhead like the spokes of a wheel. Behind one of these pillars a girl in a T-shirt printed with the festival logo sat at a desk piled with information leaflets. She went through her sheaf of papers, trying to find my details. I was scheduled to participate in an event this afternoon, she said, and after that she believed an