The World and Other Places by Jeanette Winterson

was an animal on derelict ground.’
    A couple of girls got up and went off to the ZZZ Bar. I was left alone with a wide-awake redhead squirreling out the contents of her handbag.
    She offered me a sleeping pill. I shook my head.
    ‘It’s not sleep I need,’ I said.
    She looked disappointed and lay back on the pillows watching the screen. The dream was over, we were in an advertising break, something about quality of life on a new breakfast cereal called Go!
    I rolled over beside her and kissed her surprised mouth. Horizontal contact is strictly forbidden in play-at-it bars like Sleeping Beauty. I moved across a bolster to hide us and let her undo my belt.
    Later that night, walking home arm in arm we talked about opening a fish restaurant by the sea. Holiday resorts are Sleep Designated Areas. The only difficulty is that everyone there is too exhausted to eat. Most go intravenous for a fortnight in August.
    ‘I’m lucky,’ I said. ‘I’m a Dreamer.’
    I don’t know if she understood. Then came the tough question. The question I had been afraid to ask.
    ‘Will you sleep with me?’
    Under the night rug, the star rug, moon as lantern, man in the moon watching over us, dog star at his heels, we lay.
    The planets are bodies in the solar system and so are we. You and I in elliptical orbs circling life. It is life we want, but we daren’t come too close for fear it might burn us away, this life in its intensity. We call it life force, and it is, force enough to push the shoot through clay. Force enough to impel the baby out of nothing into light.
    When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn’t be simpler. It couldn’t be harder.In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.
    Head to head, she and I, ordinary receivers of dreams. But the dreams are not ordinary. The coded lunar language is only half heard. The Aztecs believed that the moon would tell the way to the sun god. The way of darkness to the way of light. Sign into speech.
    Will it be so? Let me sleep with you. Let me hear the things you cannot say.
    And so it was morning and I went to buy the paper. I came back to my flat and went into the kitchen to make coffee. I took a cup to the bedroom and that is when I discovered that the bedroom was no longer there.
    I called your name and there was no answer. I stared at the wall, the wall where the door had been, where the bedroom had been.
    There was a noise behind me. It was my landlord.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.
    ‘Supervising the conversion,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get my letter?’
    He was holding it in his hand. I read it. It informed me that my bedroom was to be made into a separate flat. Mybedroom was surplus to requirements. It was quaint, out of date, something like a vegetable allotment in the age of the supermarket. It was a luxury. I couldn’t afford it.
    ‘But this is a one-bedroom apartment.’
    ‘You have a kitchen and a sitting room. What more do you want?’
    ‘I want a bedroom.’
    He shook his head, in regret, in disbelief, offended. I followed him outside to where a couple of men were fitting a new front door into what had been my wardrobe space. There was a large box on the pavement, marked ‘Clothes.’
    ‘Where’s my bed?’
    ‘Don’t need a bed if you ain’t got a bedroom,’ said one of the workmen logically.
    ‘Where is it, and where is what was in it?’
    There was a leer, or a sneer, or a jeer. They shrugged.
    ‘Ask in The Macbeth,’ they said, pointing to the pub at the end of the road.
    I ran down there. The Macbeth is a twenty-four-hour swill bar, a thug trough, a beer urinal. As I crashed through the doors into the pounding fists of the bass speakers, I saw my bed, trussed, trophied, pissed on, stabbed, empty.
    ‘Where is