'Once I slept with my husband every night. Every morning I sent him out with eggs for eyes and a bacon mouth. I planted lipstick kisses like flowers on his cheeks. Day by day they grew into a garden. We slept in his grandfather's big four-poster. Solid as a forest it was. He liked cotton-tight sheets, my husband. I couldn't stay still in my sleep. Revolved, I did, like a pig on a spit, round and round all night. He slept still as a stone and I learned to lie still and like it.

It took some years but I started to sleep through the afternoons too. If you can call it sleeping. You'd think I was a disgrace. Maybe you'd think it was immoral. It has always been my talent; if I can call it that. Isn't it the most natural thing?

The roof started to bother me. It was like a heavy hat I was always wearing. Pretty crushing. Don't think it ever suited me, that hat. It was'¦ bulbous, and peachy, and pink with overdone flowers... like the hat he bought me for his sisters wedding. He bought me a Labrador pup one day. I couldn't have any; babies that is, not puppies'¦ You'll think I'm loosing it and I've only just started.
Well, I couldn't really help but get used to it. I dreaded the day it might trail toilet paper through the house with its eyes like dark marsh mallows. No, not because the maze of tissues messing up the house would have bothered me, no. No it was the thought of those bunny-rabbit eyes I couldn't stomach. But she turned out to be a bounding, independent old thing! We got on with our own lives. I dozed; she bounded in the garden. I fed her; she barked contentedly.

But over time I couldn't tell the day from the night anymore. Whether dark or light, everything seemed hazy to me. Brighter days were dim like washing-up water. Darkness was black as a coalhole: couldn't see a chink of light at times'¦ but was that because it was nighttime? Or was that just because the light had gone off somewhere; got tired and slouched in a chair? I mean'¦ Just because it felt black as night, was it really time for bed, or time for breakfast? That's what I could never work out.

On a cold Monday morning in March I bundled the Labrador into the car. I put on my late mother's favourite hat ' It is straw and wide-brimmed as Kansas, falling to pieces now, light on the head'¦ And I drove away. That's how it started.'

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