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someone would throw out an old dress.
    â€˜Was it relevant?’
    â€˜How would I know?’
    â€˜Tell me then.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜It was awful.’
    â€˜Was it that bad? It was only a dream.’
    â€˜She woke me with her screams,’ the man interrupted, speaking for the first time since the morning greeting. He leant forward, both hands grasping the edge of my desk as if about to pull it closer to make me listen.
    â€˜I followed her cries through the corridors. The moon was bright last night. They had locked her in.’
    â€˜That’s not unusual – you are in a security building. How did you get in?’
    â€˜The lock was not difficult to open.’
    Nor his, it would seem.
    â€˜You need not have come – it was only a nightmare. I would have woken,’ she snapped.
    â€˜But I came. Nightmares are often worse when awake.’
    â€˜I did not ask for you to.’
    â€˜I’m surprised they don’t keep you together,’ I said, interrupting the bickering, refraining from commenting on his admission to breaking out of his room and into hers.
    â€˜Why?’ she said. ‘We are strangers.’
    â€˜So tell me your dream,’ I asked again.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜They say that if you tell your nightmare, it won’t come true,’ I said, cajoling her as one would a child. This was an old dormitory truth. I had heard the bad dreams of so many of my classmates, told in the cold of the night, and seen them vanish into nothing in the sunlight of the next day.
    â€˜Some nightmares are too real,’ said the woman, shuddering.
    â€˜And some are real,’ he added. He stood and wandered to the window, where he ran his finger over the dusty sill; it came away dark, gritty. ‘Then you wish for dreams to come and take the real thing away.’
    He wiped his finger absentmindedly across his chest, leaving a dark smear on the light cream cotton shirt he had been given to wear.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜I was in a war once. I think. Maybe it too was a dream; I hope so. Shall I tell you?’
    He offered it up to me in so casual a manner that it crossed my mind he was only telling me to draw attention from the woman; or making it up. I nodded.
    â€˜We were in the desert,’ he began. ‘It was cold at night, so cold. And we were riddled with fleas and lice: our clothes, hair, blankets. We bathed once a week if lucky and drank bad gin whenever we could, as much as we could. The days were hot. The sun hung over us like a vulture, so hard and burning it could make your eyes bleed. During the day we walked – war at a walking pace,’ he laughed mirthlessly.
    â€˜Even under fire we walked, or crawled. From hole to hole, trench to trench, digging ourselves in. Ostriches, that’s what we were. Walking and walking and pecking about and sticking our heads in the ground when danger loomed.’ He shook his head, like he had water caught in his ears.
    â€˜There were stars there too, just like at sea; a huge sky full of beauty over waves of black sand. So black … except when the guns started and then the sky would be lit, brighter than day. The stars disappeared and I’d see men like me, cowering in holes like me, blind worms, maggots, burrowing from the light, from what might drop from the skies and destroy them. Then black again. Absolutely black, like nothing had ever existed.’
    His mind was far away. ‘So much was black: the sky, the desert, our boots, our hands, faces, the bodies of men hit. Charred. But that wasn’t the worst thing about them. The worst thing about them were the contortions – men who looked like they’d died trying to wrestle death. I used to wait in my hole and pray that when death came to me I would simply lie still and accept it. I wanted death to be like a black fog, sliding into my body and enveloping me, choking me gently.’
    He stopped.