Memory is a fickle thing. I believe I am awake yet before my eyes work my nostrils were invaded by the smart tang of iodine. No. Disinfectant but not pine, nor sandalwood, nothing that I recall.

With gradual awareness of pain everywhere from big toes—yes they wriggle—to my skull, and my ears assaulted by a non-remembered electronic whining I force reluctant eyelids to open.

It’s a hospital room. It must be for this is not my room, or bed. Too narrow, too clean yet what hospital would use green sheets? It clashes with the pink walls.  A clinic then, specialising in some weird ailment I must be suspected of having. But how?

I was out cycling this morning, to the shops to buy…what was it? It’ll come to me. I can’t have dementia at only forty-one, surely. Ah yes. To Starbucks in Euston to meet with…what’s her name? I’ll go through the alphabet; that always works. Alice, Ann, Belle, Bonnie, Bryn, Carrie, Claire. That’s it! Lovely auburn-haired Claire with plaits down to her waist, last time we met to discuss marketing my invention. She’s brilliant at promo and my simple gadget to self-peel lemons needs all the help I can get now that I couldn’t get past the auditions for Dragons’ Den.

Did I suffer a bicycle accident? Temporary trauma amnesia then.  My fingers and toes all move, so do my knees though my neck is stiff and sore. I raise the nauseatingly green sheet to peep at my body, which is in a yellow gown. It’s like a Peppa Pig cartoon in here. Definitely not NHS but I have no private health insurance. Maybe the driver’s rich and is paying for this. The gown has no fastening round the front so all I see is my normal hairy legs and pink toes and sun-tanned hands. A mirror for my face please. I could use my phone to see my face and call Claire to find out if I need to apologise for being late, but there’s no locker or cupboard beside me to explore for my mobile. Nor button to summon help.

“Help!!”

A yellow door had been hiding in the yellow wall but now opens letting in a red-faced woman dressed in khaki dungarees.

“No need to scream this place up and down, Buzz.”

Strange sentence. “Sorry. No, my name is Derek Brown. Why am I here and where is here?”

“Don’t be more stupid. Derek isn’t any kind of a name and Brown? Who on this planet would have a colour for a name? Buzz Sawyer is it you are from blood tags.”

“Buzz Sawyer? Isn’t that the name of a WWE wrestler? It’s not me!”

She tidies my sheets and aims what looks like a taser at my forehead. “Maybe possible she said it was Buzz. Lie still. Thirty-seven, ninety-eight and sixteen over twenty-one. You’ll live.”

“DNA should identify me. I had a genetic test.”

“Blood tags use DNA. Calm stay.”

Strange speech mannerism. Maybe she’s a Romanian nurse. I try again. “Wait please, nurse. Who brought me in and where am I?”

“No nurse I. Decider; that’s who I am.”

I don’t like the sound of that. “If I’m all right, can I leave now?”

“Stay till fetched. We is in Crenton of course.”

“I’m unfamiliar with that name. Is it in London?”

“What Lundun is? Everyone knows who passes the tests, that Crenton is capital of England.”

A map. “I’ve a map on my phone if you give it back to me. Or do you have an atlas?”

She doesn’t seem to possess a mobile phone but rummages in a locker drawer and pulls out a crumpled paper and hands it over. “Where you from?”

It is of the British Isles. There’s the Isle of Wight, Scotland, Wales but in England where London should be is a dot labelled Crenton. It’s on the River Times. There’s a random knitting pattern of roads with no recognisable motorway names. Of course, my mind has created this nonsense in this dream I’m inhabiting.

This is madness. Just a moment, am I in a mental institution and instead of being a nurse, this woman was one of the inmates? Apparently not; she wore a name badge. ‘Dec. Mel Stone’. There’s that Dec for decider again. Decide what? My life or death?

I try with a more conciliatory tone. “Excuse me, Decider, why am I here?”

“Found, unconscious in the road. Recents Park near.”

She must mean Regent’s Park—that’s near Euston Station. “Did I have a bicycle accident?”

“Bicycle? What is?”

“Oh, come on. A bicycle. You know. Two wheels and two pedals you use with your feet and a saddle to sit on.” I was losing my tone rather rapidly.

She chortled. “Really? You have dreams so strange.”

Of course. This must be all a dream, or nightmare. I push back the greens to get out of bed. Although I ache all over—probably from a real accident on a real bike—I am well enough to walk and wake up properly.

“No, no Buzz, you were lost to consciousness, a concussion. Observations so stay.”

“Listen, Deciding Stone, this…” I wave my arms around. “…is all a dream and I want to return to reality. My previous life.”

She laughs at me as if I’d just fallen out of a Christmas cracker as the joke.

Saliva drools out of her unhygienic mouth.  “How do know you that your previous life—as call it you—wasn’t a dream because I know I real am?”

Absurd. I rub my forehead as if that helps. “I am forty-one years old. I have that many years of memory as a child, my sisters and parents, school, university and my career as owner of an engineering firm making helicopter parts. I know dreams travel at the speed of light in our heads but not forty-one-years-worth of living in one night!”

“Well, buzzy-bee, it seems like did you. What be a hell copper?”

Not again. Either she’s a fantastic leg-puller or this is the dream I need to wake from. I need to get out to speak to other people, see outside, find a bloody bicycle. I attempt once more to get up but suddenly she pulls back her arm, swings it around and slaps my face, Hard. I can’t believe a nurse would…and I did nothing to stop it.

“What the hell are you doing? That’s assault!” My hand is on my heat-throbbing cheek as I fell back onto the bed in shock.

“Buzzboy can’t leave. I bring restraints?”

“What? No! I insist on discharging myself.”

“Not possible. I summon Super Ordinator.”

“This is a hospital. Right? With care for patients running short.”

She stood, hands on hips ready to smack me again. “As you engineer be, no. Again you dream. Reality you be an indentured servant. That’s why you cannot leave without master.”

“A slave? Now I know you’re joking. Where’s this Superman you’ve summoned?”

The yellow door reopened to allow in a stout man. Shock of white hair yet he looked to be in his forties. Like me. His khaki uniform was like Decider-patient-beater but with a scarlet broad sash running diagonally from his right shoulder to his waist. I have no illusions of getting more sense from him.

He coughed. “Lumpen Buzzz Sawyer. Your master nearly here. Transport you then to his auberge. Be well.”

He turns to leave, so I shout, “Wait. I have a family. A wife! Well ex-wife but—”

Another slap from decider sends me speechless onto my back.

“Indeed. Your allocated wife be there. You have been hers for a decade. Be well or be dead.”

I want to ask him more but the death threat and another slap from Nightmare Nurse shuts me up. I need to think.

How can I show that this is not my real life?

I pinch my arm, hard. Damn that hurts and it makes Decider frown at me as if she’s the only one allowed to inflict pain.

“May I see my medical notes please?”

“Forbidden.”

“No, I have the right under the Data Protection Act to see information about myself.” I leave out the exception relating to mental instability.

“Forbidden. No such law.”

I scrutinise her in an effort to detect a lie, lots of lies. Black hair, sky-blue eyes, normally attractive in both genders. Hers go deep, nearly transparent. But yes, I see a devilishly twisted demon. Damn, it’s my reflection in her eyes.

I sink back into and between the lumps in the mattress and deeper in despair. Must be a dream. If I go to sleep I’ll wake up back in England. My England with a real London, bicycles and no slavery except for unfortunate illegal immigrants.  

I’m afraid to go to sleep. Suppose I ‘wake’—assuming I am awake now—in a worse scenario: bottom of a deep well; tied to a railway track; being chased by a fast-running, hungry alligator; or in a mad hospital ward where I’m turned into a slave for ever breaking rocks? For any of those, the thing is to escape.

I pretend to fall asleep. A while later all is quiet so I risk opening one eye a smidgen. No sign of Oberführer Decider so I slip out of my lettuce-coloured sheets and tiptoed to tall lockers for clothes more appropriate for outdoorsy non-patients. Something non-yellow please. Damn, a choice of one—pink. Ugh. Fine if when I get outside everybody is wearing pink, but suppose they’ll all in black, but me?

I rummage in the other lockers. No clothing, but boxes of needles, gloves, instruments like weird pliers that look as if they should be in a garage rather than a hospital. Nothing labelled NHS. Most have a green logo of an infinity symbol and the words: Value First. The kind of label on cheap tack. I tuck scissors and tape in the coverall pocket, roll it up and creep open the door. No one in the yellow corridor. Same colour as the floor and ceiling too; everyone would look jaundiced. The next ward, room, cell, whatever is empty but a large window draws me like a magnet.