Jazz draws in through the open window from a bar across the narrow street as the day’s light begins to disappear: it slices cleanly through the dense, fume-filled, end-of-summer atmosphere. The wooden partition beside the bed muffles the sound of retching from the next room, and a tired quietness settles in the air. The weak, hopeless flush of a toilet follows, and the halting, sporadic trickle of a slowly filling cistern. Somewhere in the building a man shouts, and a girl, maybe a child, starts to sob. On the ceiling, far above the bed, an old, ineffective fan clicks and whirrs, and in that squalid little room the mysteries of suffering and madness begin to mix and curdle one more time in the stagnant Athens twilight.

For almost a month Fiacre has been lying in the rented room, held tight in the noise and grime of the city. He arrived in a bad way from Corinth on a military bus, all guns and elbows as he remembers it. It was in the early hours of an October morning, 1977. He sat shivering and cold on a concrete slab near the parliament until things began to bustle up a bit. It was way too early to look for a room at that time of the morning and the bus had been a bad idea. He should have stayed on in Manolo’s flat in Corinth, and he might have done just that if the idea to leave hadn’t come to him in the middle of a fever when he wasn’t thinking straight. And he’d had a row with Manolo.

On the way to Athens the only way Fiacre had of keeping from passing out was to fix his gaze on the vague shapes that floated by at odd angles in the dark, and on the flames that shot into the night from distant oil refineries; as he stared and stared someone up near the front of the bus put their head out of the window and vomited, and it splattered over the window Fiacre was sitting beside. He sat and thought about this for a while, concentrating his gaze now on the menacing death-mouth of the gun the soldier on his other side was holding loosely across his knees. The gun was pointing straight at him and the soldier’s head was thrown back, asleep, his mouth hanging open just like his gun. The sleeping warrior keeled over as the bus swerved to miss something on the road and he slumped down on Fiacre’s shoulder. It gave him the only heat he had felt for a long while so he just let the soldier lie there.