Lochhead had stared at the dust on the slat of the blind and then, taking his own poor advice, he had run his finger through it for a couple of inches, ruffling and rumpling that dust into a kind of asteroid impact crater such as you can see on the surface of the moon, even through binoculars, and that crater had stayed there for what, for two years? The thought of taking a damp cloth and wiping all of that away.

When the blind rattled in the draught it sounded like reluctant applause. The blinds cast shadows like blades on his gritty carpet. He watched them sweep across it, reducing and re-shaping his room without moving a grain of dust. The slat shadows, light and dark, looked like the rungs of a ladder to him. The light dazzled, the weather was vicious. On the floor, the light could be thick like oil or thin like water. The fine rain fell in webs.

He had decided to abandon the garden, which he considered a commonplace thing to do. Its fecundity repelled him. It swarmed. It seethed. He knew of one or two other houses in his long street with abandoned gardens. These had not given him the idea. One of these had a serious light problem because the brambles had grown up to and over the windows. It was possible that no one even lived there, or that they lived upstairs. Lochhead did not intend to have such a problem.

He had had a long garden with a good thickness of trees, oaks and a walnut, at the bottom of it, between him and the railway. He had had buzzards over those trees once or twice.

He measured gardens in hours. A one-hour privet hedge, twice a year. A forty-minute lawn, twice a month. So many turns of his tall wooden hour-glass. That was reading-time gone that was. Lochhead was not lazy, he had a different kind of work in mind. He did not intend to sit in his faded chair and drink. This is not that kind of a story. It is not a story about a man who does things, it is about a man who stops doing them, in a sense. He was a reader, not a drinker. And reading was work. He despised the reading habits that he supposed others indulged; they did not know how to read, they flicked over a lot of pages.

There were things about the garden he would miss. Such as the dragonflies that came to his little pond. Skimmers, chasers, hawkers and darters, cruising the iris and the hedges for flies. Their unexpected dips and unpredictable changes of direction. They are like flying spiders, although they do not look like them, spinning webs of air.

There were more things he would not miss. The marks that insects, nettles and brambles left on him were like jail house tattoos. He was their prey. When he had had a dog and had let him run through the almost wood, the dog had got ticks. Now Lochhead got them, the ticks not distinguishing between him and the dog. He knew the tick removal advice, that plastic fork with just two fat tines, the sort of thing you were given in the chip shop, except with the head of the fork at an angle so that you could lay the tines either side of the embedded tick and manoeuvre it upwards and out. The idea was not to squeeze the contents of the tick’s body into yourself. Lyme disease. Lyme borreliosis. Fatigue, joint pain, facial paralysis. Symptoms can last six months, even if you start taking the antibiotics in time. So, he knew the drill, but he disregarded it. He pulled them out with his finger nails, evicting them from their cosy burrows of bloody flesh. They seemed to have hard dry little bodies to him. Nothing much to squeeze out. You had to look at them through a hand lens even to make sure they were not thorns. They were most often on his ankles or at his waist. They crawled in the gaps between your clothes. He had one between his shoulder blades that was tough to remove. He scraped it out with a screwdriver. Flathead, not a Phillips. He had another in his navel that was just too fiddly. They drop off after about three days anyway.

At the front of the house there was almost no garden, but his door was masked with ropes of wintry honeysuckle, like a hairy veil. He broke off sprigs of new growth when they brushed against his face. You didn’t realize what dry stuff it was until you had even one or two sparrows clattering through it.

Although he had not intended it, the garden had been only the beginning of this. Lochhead’s house was too big. He did not want it, not all of it. Now, right from the very start, he did have misgivings about this idea. He was by no means certain that he would not regret this at some point. Possibly some point soon. Nonetheless, he went up to what was the spare bedroom so-called and took stock. He had always disliked this room, well, for a long time now. It smelled of failure. Its old-fashioned, heavily-patterned wallpaper, psychedelic, hallucinatory, was a Rorschach test that no one could ever pass. There were chairs stacked in the classic style of closing restaurants, for which he had no use. He removed the storage heater, which it later turned out no longer worked, the old army greatcoat, the photograph albums, a box of comic books, two clocks that looked alright but needed batteries, a pillow which he changed his mind about and put back and a lamp. There was the broken fan with the tortoiseshell handle which he also put back. And two tropical real butterflies mounted in cheap plastic wood frames. He then closed that door and said,

– I am never going into that room again.

His world had got smaller by a tiny but satisfying increment. He remembered what he had said to Paul, at work, after that disappointing holiday in Spain,

– It will be a long time before you catch me turning my pounds into pesetas again.

He felt as though he had solved a small problem forever. It was not just the clutter he objected to, the unnecessary things, he disliked the space itself.

As for that bamboo hat stand in the hall, he took that out into the street after dark and left it in front of a house a few doors down.

He would read for one hour. He turned his glass and watched the sand trickle through into a pink cone with a circular depression at the apex, constantly bombarded with further grains of sand, thus wasting some of his hour.

Lochhead was afraid every night. The dark was a pelt to him.

He dozed in his armchair, finally falling solidly asleep in a fortress of brazen light.

That first room set a precedent. Or the garden had done that, or something even earlier. It is not easy to say how some things get started. The house even set him an example. Those four drawers built as a tower, like a skyscraper; something had fallen behind the drawer at the bottom, so that the drawer would no longer shut properly. It always bounced out half an inch. He would have had to take the whole unit apart to get at it. It was probably just a sock. He had too many. Forget about it. That was just sense.

He was drawing the horizon nearer, like a black hole sucking in light. He would hear something fall in a room upstairs, something heavy and say,

– That is not my responsibility.

He began to think about other rooms, to gather what he really wanted about him. He developed a distaste and then a loathing for the parts of the house he had abandoned, one room at a time. What he salvaged was not useful, at least, that’s not how it looked. From the garden he had brought in a Gigaku mask. Let’s be clear about that. He had once had a postcard of a photograph of a Gigaku mask, a clown. And when he was at school he had made a thumb pot, two thumb pots, which he had put together to make a head, which he had turned into a money box and given to his mother. She loved it so much she decided to keep it in her rockery. It was a bad pot. A thumb pot made by a potter who only had thumbs. When he got the postcard, he could see that the mask looked like the pot, to him. It was exotic, after a fashion, and he could use that.

As he retreated, the world advanced. He had once holidayed in a huge old farmhouse in Spain and he had been told that a barn owl had nested in one of the attic rooms, so best not go in there. Things came in if you gave them a chance, invaded. No one had tried the door, he had not seen the owl himself.

Here dust and silence settled. He craved these things on occasion.

He put down poison for rats and mice. They were too much. Everything becomes poisonous if you leave it long enough, and then stops being poisonous again. If he ever wanted these rooms back, and why should he, he would have to fight for them. It might have been better if the desert had taken what he had pushed away, rather than the animals. He could not share.

He did not kill the flies. He waited for these short-lived creatures to die. He found chrysalides on his mahogany dresser, itself like a stolen altar-piece, eggs buried in little cotton wool balls, like snow. The mosquitoes clipped in and out of the light. They used the shadows so well. They hunted Lochhead and he hunted them. He was in two minds, frequently. Caught between defenders and attackers, he was in the crossfire of himself.

The house shook when he ran up the stairs and when he slammed a door, it shuddered. Things stopped working. The light above the bathroom mirror, which also powered his razor. He decided to grow a beard, which was not really a decision. Then the light in the bathroom ceiling went and the water no longer got hot enough. The fan in the wall that came on when you pulled the light switch stopped coming on and the room started to smell of mould. He washed in the dark. He didn’t need to see his face, he looked at the Gigaku head.

He believed the ghost of an old woman haunted the house. The previous occupant, from a very long time ago. He ignored her and she him.

He would have grown a carapace if he could, a cocoon, a shell like a mollusc. He pulled his hugger mugger around about him. He stuffed the crevices with it. He sought asylum in his own home. He kept a soup mug, with no handle, full of buttons and needles. When the invasive spring tentacles of the bramble tapped at his window, he snipped them off with his scissors, as close to the ground as he could reach.

You do say goodbye to people, he thought. Sitting on the train as it pulls out of the platform, not waving back at your daughter and son-in-law and thinking there she goes after all these years and now we will never meet again. He had let go as soon as the train started. You say goodbye to your flesh and bones. To the flesh of your flesh.

He turned the hour-glass. He liked to keep time where he could see it. He read. The Vivisector. Concrete Island. Pincher Martin. Paul to the Corinthians. Proust. Sinclair. A hard yard of paperbacks. He picked up any of them anywhere. And he read.

He started to think about sleeping on the sofa. Broad enough, certainly. He was aware that these were choices only a single man could make. So, simply, why not? His self-immersion was pathetic, he knew. He did not feel that he had chosen that.

 He was down to one room. He had been cast away in his own front room. Plus, the necessary, of course. Lochhead might have lived at the top of the house, in an eyrie, but that would not have been convenient. He wasn’t doing much cooking. Warming things through. He had never spent more than five minutes washing up. Think of the housework people used to do. Those brass ornaments of his grandmother’s, the only purpose of which was to give her something to polish. Obviously, she should have thrown those away. He was gouging out a place for himself. Nothing is more natural to a man than a cave. He could see everything that he wanted. Lochhead had arranged his belongings in miniature ziggurats on the floor of his room. It was like a Mayan temple complex with its courts, crumbling colonnades and galleries. Surrounded by volcanoes. Everything in this room had a critical place. Here was an interdependent architecture. Moving a pile of books required planning permission. It was more than that, it was a surgical operation. Rearrange one area and another would be starved of oxygen, vital tissue would flood with plasma urgently required elsewhere. Cut a channel and a marsh supporting a unique Ice Age flora would drain. This was his cell, where he was a prisoner, an anchorite, a bee. The room belonged to him and he to it. He watched the motes in the sunbeam fall in a blizzard. He turned the glass. He noticed the spiders’ webs in festoons. A literary word. More like hammocks really, or nets hung to dry in the sun, or for mending. Dust lay in soft drifts. He could have tunnelled into it, or would have liked to.

There were negatives. Just as he could not control his dreams, which did not fear, his books spoke truth to power. Sinclair talks of the walled nowhere of the asylum. Virgilio Piñera said we each inhabit the hell we create, its walls are of thought, its roof of terror, its windows are abysses. He threw up redoubts and barricades, he dug systems of trenches and built bunkers and sepulchral blockhouses. He trod terraces and piled up cairns. He reinforced bulkheads. He was a survivalist unmotivated by a desire to survive. He noticed an inch of tinsel stuck by a rusty drawing pin to a neglected corner of the picture rail. There was no time here, no season.

Think about the woman who is the love of your life. In theory, at least. You adore her, you remain loyal to her, but her absence causes you no concern; there is no anguish. He would look through his atlas and see himself occupying the smallest possible point, a microdot left by a spy, in those abused pages. The cell is a private place to which no one seeks access. It is a secret that no one wants to know. He could reign over this territory. He could manage this. He had retreated within himself, so that he was his own heart, lungs, liver and intestines. He was his viscera. His life had retreated from the extremities to keep a very inner thing warm. He thought of a man removing a dental plate or unscrewing an artificial leg. He wondered whether he would get to the grave with all of his bits.

Lochhead thought,

– The shape between things in this silent home is the shape of me. I have built a model of myself. If this room could cast a single shadow, that shadow would be mine. I have carved an image of myself in silhouette. Man and the universe is of one form.

He felt wadded by the air in the room.

– My books, my papers, my solitude.

He remembered an estuary at low tide; all virgin mud, sculpted by a channel of deep water, snaking through it like one deadly blow from a curved blade.

Even within the one room there was a sanctum sanctorum, his chair and the adjacent card table. Here he had his pens and the plastic boxes of cartridges, which he called his ammunition and his sheaf of papers on which he made his notes and which he culled from junk mail and flattened-out envelopes. He also kept his binoculars by him. He used these for examining the spines of books across the room, to save him getting up.

The mosquitoes were indestructible. They sliced through the air like a cheese-wire. Vivisecting him. He thought of Olenin, walking through the Cossack woods, his face smeared with sweat and mosquito paste. He said he got used to them. In fact, he said he grew to like them, the feel of their stings, even right through his shirt. Humming like razors, they burrowed crazy spirals in the world.

 Alberto Ruy Sánchez tells the story, within a story, of a sailing ship, in danger of being wrecked by a storm. The crew throw holy relics into the sea and these create a halo of calm that slowly spreads until the ship is saved. This is the opposite of the usual method, throwing dead weight overboard to make the ship lighter. Those sailors threw the relics into the sea to make the world safer.

 When you draw a line around yourself, like the roughly concentric lines of defence around a fortress, you create a frontier and it is there that pressure is brought to bear, there that the horror accumulates. You have created that space where it lives. Retreat within an inner wall and the horror follows. Each retreat creates a new space like the one abandoned. What if you throw your relics over the wall? Create a space outside like the one where you feel safe.

 His jacket was placed over a chair, looking a little green now around the shoulders and deformed through being moulded to the back of the chair. He wore it when it got cold in the room. The green he later found, to his amusement, was actually moss and it shimmered, giving the distressed denim a viridescent corona.

 Lochhead was not sure of the life of abstinence and prayer. He could cocoon himself in the sheath of a woman. He was troubled by a contest between shapelessness and geometry. He was close to giving himself an ultimatum. He was making his world of books, of words. These could become clotted. A trap, or somewhere to hide. Paul had been a writer and a missionary. Sinclair writes of cubicles of incubation in which to dream of fantastic journeys.

 Sleepless Lochhead, despairing of sleep, would deliberately imagine, not dream, that he was a machine, a thing moving but neither asleep nor awake, an hour-glass.

 Lochhead placed a finger in his book and stared at the hour-glass. He believed the glass had once lived on a ship. It was approaching that fascinating moment when there would be one more grain of sand in the bottom of the glass than in the top. There must be such a moment, but it is invisible. The point of equilibrium immediately disappears. He had an idea that this point was in some way equivalent to Paul’s hour of favour and then he made the further unwarranted transformation into thinking that any wish made at that hour would come true. He was not aware that he had a thing to wish for. He stared at one of his pieces of furniture for several minutes, wondering what it was, then realized it was the TV set.

 He picked up the glass and held it on its side. If you turned the glass in this way at just that moment, then time would stop and the balance be preserved. Or a tipping point. The moment when the marooned sailor decides that he will eat the flesh of the fellow who died the day before.

 The two glasses in his time-piece were like twins, he thought. One happy, interesting, successful and the other Lochhead. In literature, one twin was always becoming the other one. He knows that you can choose the world that you want. That there is no escape from art, although you can choose between good and bad art. You can either write a story, or you are in one.

 Time alone makes things happen, but it does tend to make things worse. It makes you hungrier, dirtier, more tired. The acquired taste for alcohol and the sour. Wait and your palate will change. If the only thing you have to eat is something you don’t like, you only have to wait to be hungry enough before you will eat it. The heartbroken man who lives with his sadness by saying his lost love does not matter, that he is forgetting it. Then he says that from now on he will admit that he is very sad. He embraces his heartbreak.

 The sun dripped into the room through the slippery funnels of his window and streamed in filthy waves to unexpected pools, even seas, of molten light.

 Lochhead might abandon his principles; betray himself and begin to prefer the filth and the shit he had previously abjured, then he could live in the whole house again. He would not have to clean it, to make it tidy. This was like the Temptation of Christ. Give up your one precious thing and you can have everything in exchange for it. There is nothing love cannot face. There is no limit to its faith, its hope, its endurance.

 This oscillation was at least a pulse, a palpitation even. Systole and diastole, perhaps, or the throb of infection. He began to think of the sand in his glass as a tide. The ebb and flow. He had a delirious sense of his blood circulating. He would stare at bars cast on the dreadful carpet and feel his irises contracting and dilating at agonising speed. His retreat had been a tactical withdrawal. He had enticed the enemy. He need not drive the owls from the attic, he could accommodate them.

 Lochhead contemplated the decision that would change his life and reflected on the disconcerting feeling that he had done this many times already.

– Have I always been here? Did I actually voluntarily abandon anything?

He began to feel older as it approached, much older, but knew he would feel younger again afterwards. The Caesarean caesura. When Lochhead began to turn into himself he knew the hour of favour had come.