To begin with you are going on a holiday with your family. Your children are young, younger perhaps than you would have expected, the youngest small enough to ride in a pushchair. At a service station some older children loiter near your picnic table and one of them tries to impress his friends by harassing your loved ones. He offers sexual insults to your wife. In an ideal world you would grasp him by the neck, force him over to the kiosk and batter his face relentlessly into the plate glass. This being impracticable you pretend that what is happening is not happening. You are a clown of propriety, peremptory and stiff, chivvying your family away from the scene as if they are to blame.

     In due course it becomes apparent that you and your father are standing naked and washing yourselves in an open shower area that has been installed at one end of a large, busy room. Colleagues and acquaintances go about their business. You know better than anyone how he suffers but you cannot make it easier. He will never speak of what has hurt him in his life. Instead you fall into a guilty row with your mother over one of the outrageous statements she makes as if they are common knowledge. She has claimed that people can be divided into the strong and the weak. Your indignation is excessive and you are losing the high ground. You throw a china cup at the tiles. Now that you have started you cannot stop.

     Next comes the celebration you have been promised. It is not clear how the children are accounted for but it does not seem to be a concern. The beat pounds through all the dark chambers of a labyrinthine structure, a honeycomb of shabby rooms. The two of you have come here together and you cannot find anyone you know. She has taken a pill so music flows through her and she dances with superb strength and grace. The party’s half-light reveals it all with the most attentive intimacy. She is too old to be acting this way yet by virtue of this very fact she has never been younger. The beauty she has now she could not have had at twenty because she had no need then to demonstrate such gallantry, such valour, such nerve.You stare in at her where she dances safe with her delight. You were supposed to take the pill but you were scared and chose to pretend. She does not seem to care that you are a traitor. Her face is ablaze and she keeps coming back for you, reaching out. You have known one another such a long time and you would do it all again.

     An interlude now in which you have been banished to a haunted house that is a universe in itself. There are no windows or exterior doors, only a series of dusty, junk-filled rooms lit by bare bulbs in brass stands. You have arrived with four strangers but the evil spirit of the house incites an orgy of suicide and murder and soon you are the only one left. Over the weeks that pass as you try to devise a means of exit you come to understand that you have been in this place before. You were brought here as a small child and languished alone for an ageless lifetime before being released to reality. As you recover the memory you begin to tear at the boarded-over fireplace, bloodying your fingers, kicking the planks away. You find a shaft extending horizontally for hundreds of metres, its roof so low that you would have to wriggle on your belly to investigate where it leads. From a hatch at the far end an organism unfolds with gloating languor. A dead spider with orang-utan limbs and the head of a maths master. Little sharp-toothed helpers swerve like tops towards you and you do not have time to turn away.

     What follows is an afterwards with the family taking occupation of a kind of cabin or chalet, a small timber house of modernistic design and inept construction. Uncurtained picture windows overlook wet pine forest in all directions. You set your luggage on the warped floorboards. It is not what you were led to expect. You drove up miles of mud track to get here and it will be impossible to get the car back down the way you came. The artefacts of the previous residents are everywhere: foreign-language magazines, unfinished woodwork projects, photographs of irrelevant teenagers, folding knives. Directly you are in the middle of your meltdown, hysterical with self-pity and fear. Your children do their best to calm you. Your older boy is developing a suite of tics and stereotypies before your eyes while the other two are learning to be silent, to give way and accept defeat. Even as you inflict the harm you are seeking excuses for your behaviour. You imply that this is a private crisis, the sort that can be resolved merely by coming to terms with the fact that one day you are going to die. At that your wife cannot help laughing, and after a moment you join in.

     Soon enough you all feel better. You unpack and take stock of the board games. You make dinner. You joke a little about the padlocked door at the end of the hall. You wonder what it will be like in here when the daylight goes.