For the briefest of instants, his mind was a blank. He knew the details of the present moment: he was climbing a dark, narrow staircase; the air was warm and close, sour-smelling; his right temple ached. But none of these facts gave him any clue to where or when this was happening, or even to his own identity.

He stood still, breathing heavily, and a hundred vague staircases swam together in his memory. Had he been here before? It looked familiar, but then a staircase was a staircase. That smell reminded him of something, though. What was it? Rotten vegetables, he thought. Uncollected refuse. Human faeces. He listened closely and heard the faint hum of traffic; someone coughing from behind a door.

Suddenly, unbidden, a series of quick, hazy images flashed through his mind. Seconds later, they had vanished, and he was left with no remembrance of them except for one: the vague, half-turned-away face of a dark-haired girl. As far as he could tell, she looked young and beautiful, but he had no idea who she was, or why she had entered his mind. He felt sure he had never seen her before. For some reason, however, the sight of her face filled him with a strange emotion. It was, he thought, an emotion without a name: whatever it is that exists on the border between hope and fear.

For a moment he was breathless, suspended in time, and then a drop of sweat trickled down his forehead and into his eye. It stang. He blinked. And, in the second that it took for his eyes to close and reopen, it all came back to him.

Reality. The present. His self.

His name was James Purdew. He lived in Amsterdam, in an apartment he shared with his Dutch girlfriend, Ingrid. He had just come back from work to make himself a sandwich. It was lunchtime on Monday 21 July; the day before his twenty-ninth birthday.

Relieved, he began climbing the stairs again. All in all, the blackout could not have lasted more than a few seconds. He had no idea what had brought it on — a momentary break in the supply of oxygen to his brain? — but he felt sure it was nothing to worry about.

Halfway up the stairs, he heard a harsh, urgent, familiar sound. He started to run, taking the steps two at a time. Near the top of the third flight, he missed his footing, slipped, and felt a small crack. Still the sound continued, high-pitched and imperative. The pain was horrific, but he managed to climb the last few steps, unlock the door of the apartment and crawl towards the telephone. It had stopped ringing by then, of course. All he could hear was the recent memory of its ringing, like a disturbance in the air.

Even now he remembers vividly the thirty-nine seconds he spent crawling across the sitting-room floor, though naturally it seemed to him to take much longer than that. He remembers sweat dripping from his forehead on to the smooth, pale floorboards, and resting there in perfect little pools. He remembers the sound of blood beating in the veins inside his eardrums. He remembers how strange and distant the ceiling appeared from his position on the floor. Or, at least, he remembers remembering these details; the pictures themselves quickly faded, as all such pictures do, and he is forced to reimagine them — to invent them anew — whenever he tries to bring to mind the events of that fateful day.

The first thing he did when he reached the telephone was to check the answer machine. One message. He played it: nothing but a staticky hiss followed by a long beep. He listened to the message again, searching for clues, then he dialled 9293, but the caller had suppressed their number. With an odd feeling of guilt, he erased the message.

Only then did he call for an ambulance.

The doctor said James had broken a small bone in his right ankle and would have to spend eight weeks in plaster. This was the summer of the great heatwave. It was so hot during the days that the tomatoes in the windowbox were already cooked when he picked them from the vine. James kept the blinds closed and the windows open, but he could feel the furnace heat breathing against the thin strips of grey metal. Whenever a rare gust of wind moved the blinds, it was like staring into the mouth of hell.

He didn’t wear clothes during those eight weeks: there was no point. Most of the time he was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts and the plastercast. His girlfriend was working, so he spent the hottest part of each day alone. He sat in the leather reclining chair, which he covered with a towel to soak up his sweat. On the left arm of the chair he kept the remote control for the television; on the right the remote for the stereo. The telephone was on the table next to the chair. It rang so seldom that he kept checking the wires at the back, thinking they must have come loose.

He also kept a collection of flyswatters to hand. They were doubly useful. With the head of one he would murder insects; with the handle of another he would scratch at the dead, flaking skin inside his cast.

Ingrid kept the fridge stocked with fresh fruit, chocolate, beer and mineral water, and the freezer full of ice-cubes and ice-cream. Every hour or so James would hobble over to put something cold in his mouth or on his forehead. Other than that, he barely moved at all.

There were plenty of books in the apartment, but he found he couldn’t read. His head was too full of noise; a kind of formless buzzing. And the greater the silence in the flat, the louder his head buzzed. For this reason, he usually kept something ‘on’: TV, CD, DVD. And the electric fan, of course. He was lucky there were no blackouts that summer. Without electricity, he would have gone crazy.

This was a nightmarish time for James, but it had some interesting side-effects. He felt so trapped, helpless, bored, so suffocatingly alone, that he started doing something he hadn’t done for a long time.

He started thinking.

In the evenings, when it cooled and the streets were shaded by the tall apartment blocks, James would cautiously hop downstairs, clinging to the banister. During the first four weeks Ingrid would help, carrying his crutches with one hand and supporting his body with the other. Once she’d gone, he had to do it alone. 

Coming from the stale apartment, the city air, for all its toxins, smelled like a mountain breeze to James. He would walk as far and as fast as he could. To start with, even going to the next canal and back would leave him sweating and in pain. But as the days passed he became used to swinging himself forward with the crutches, always straight ahead, letting the other pedestrians move out of his way.

After the walk, he went to Harry’s Bar, at the end of the block. The waiter saved his table, overlooking the canal, and brought out a tall beer, a ham sandwich, a green salad, a plate of chips and a dish of homemade mayonnaise. Harry would wave from the bar, and James would wave back. He would eat and drink and watch the tourists, the sky, the canal. From where he sat the water glimmered pink, orange, silver, gold, black... it flickered like fire in the slowly gathering darkness.

Even when Ingrid and James were together, the two of them didn’t talk much. Ingrid had said all she had to say, and she knew James had a lot on his mind. After the first drink she would kiss him goodbye and go off to do whatever she felt like doing: cinema, yoga, Spanish nightclass. Then, around midnight, she would come and collect him, and help him up the stairs to her apartment. During the final four weeks, James had to manage this on his own. He was usually quite drunk by then, which made it both easier and more dangerous.

Even with the windows open, even with the fan on full speed, the air in the apartment would still be warm and thick. Ingrid, exhausted by work, usually fell asleep quickly, but James never did. Sometimes he sat out on the balcony and watched the drunks and nightwalkers in Liebestraat. Sometimes he listened to music on headphones. Sometimes he watched a blue movie on television.

James and Ingrid had sex together only twice after he broke his ankle, and both times occurred the very next morning, on his birthday. Their celibacy, I should add, was nothing to do with the plastercast. It was to do with the thoughts in his head.