Elsie cannot sleep. She tosses and turns and looks again at the clock on the wall opposite. Five minutes to six. Far too early to get up, really but she has been wriggling around in bed for at least an hour. At 5.20, when she last looked at the clock, she realised she was fully awake and unlikely to get back to sleep. What is her problem? Why, she asks herself, am I unable to get a good, full night’s sleep? It was the same last night and the night before, but this morning is worse than it’s ever been. It really seems that she has been living in a sort of dazed bubble for almost two months now. She does all her usual chores, cooks all the meals, looks after the children but all of it, everything, in a kind of daydream as though she were sleepwalking through life. She breathes deeply.
It wa
