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move round my head, almost as if something were crawling around the interior of my skull, starting at the nape of the neck and then shifting around the right side of my head to lodge itself in the centre of my forehead. I took two aspirin, and waited for the analgesic to do its stuff, but it seemed not to be working. The headache grew steadily in intensity so that it became impossible to ignore it. It was not blinding, it was not pulsing, but it was indubitably, naggingly there. I massaged my forehead with my fingertips, I rubbed my brow with the soothing gel that is provided in the complimentary first-class toilet bag and finally took out my work hoping that distraction would make it abate, or at least I would have something other to think about than the visions of blood clots, strokes and tumours that were beginning to nudge their way into my reasoning mind.
    So I looked at my sketches for the Demarco terraces, the sweep of walkways down to the pool and its surrounding plantations, and I took out my pencil to add a little cross hatching to the row of cypresses I had decided to plant behind the pool house.
    I began to shade in the leaf darkness and then, quite suddenly, I felt my arm growing cold as if there were a draught blowing on my right side. At the same time I noticed, but did not feel, that my grip upon the silver barrel of the pencil was strengthening, my nails flushed with blood, and a slight but discernible tremor of effort made the point of the pencil shimmer like a seismograph about to register a major eruption.
    And then I began – or rather – then my
hand
began to make signs, big bold signs across my delicate drawing of the Demarco terraces. The signs looked like a form of elongated ‘x’, each of the four arms of the letter drawn out horizontally. My hand was lifting the pencil from the page in order for this sign to be properly drawn, and, as I finished one, my hand would immediately begin to draw another. Soon my sketch was covered and I flipped the page to allow the writing to continue. And so it did, deliberately, quite meticulous, all the ‘x’ shapes being drawn the same size, with nothing manic or frenzied about them.
    I sat there, almost without breathing, as my right hand autonomously continued to mark the page. At one stage I reached over to place my left hand on top of my right fist, but I seemed incapable of exerting any force, the pencil continued to move, and soon I lifted my hand and watched as the mass of x’s began to darken the page. I hunched over, to make it look as if I was writing, as the cabin staff passed up and down the aisle. By now I was sweating copiously and I was seized with a kind of terror which was unfamiliar to me. As my right hand moved across the page of its own volition I wondered if something had malfunctioned in my brain – as if the headache was the sign of the rupturing of some crucial blood vessels, or that some critical malfunction of my neurotransmitters had taken place, and I began to hear, in my inner ear, the sound of a silent wailing – a keening desperate bafflement – as ifmy soul, the soul of Alexander Rief, seemed to have lost control of the body it inhabited.
    The ‘seizure’, the ‘fit’, seemed to last, I don’t know, five minutes, ten minutes, I had not looked at my watch. Suddenly I felt my hand stop and the pencil point lay inert on the page. I felt my arm warm again as I touched it gently with the fingers of my left hand. I let the pencil fall and clenched and unclenched my fist. My brain seemed empty, suddenly quiet after the clamour of my inner misery and I exhaled slowly. Carefully I picked up the pencil, turned it in my fingers and I wrote down my name. ‘My name is Alexander Rief. My name is Alexander Rief…’ It was only after ten minutes or so, when I had finally calmed down somewhat, that I noticed my headache had disappeared.
    ‘I sit in the gathering gloom of this Californian garden,’ I wrote that night in my journal,