I wake up, blinking hard against the sky, and the first thing I remember is that my wife cannot forgive me. Never, ever.

Then I remind myself I don't have a wife anymore.

Instead, I'm lying at the bottom of a stairwell, thirty concrete steps below street level in a city far from my home. My home is in the past, and I must live in the present.

I'm lying on a soft pile of rubbish bags, and I seem to have got myself covered in muck. It's all over my shabby green raincoat and the frayed sleeves of my jumper, and there's a bit on my trousers as well. I sniff it, trying to decide what it is, but I can't be sure.

How strange I didn't notice it when I was checking this place out last night. OK, it was already dark by then and I was desperate to find somewhere to doss down after being moved on twice already. But I remember crawling into the rubbish really carefully, prodding the bin bags with my hands and thinking this was the softest and driest bed I was likely to find. Maybe the muck seeped out later on, under pressure from my sleeping body.

I look around for something to wipe my clothes with. There's nothing really. If I were a cat, I'd lick the crap off with my tongue, and still be a proud, even fussy creature. But I'm not a cat. I'm a human being.