Portway, Plaistow.

Through the cracks in your eyelids you look at the room. All the night condensed into a cupful of cinders.

There is the phosphor of a lit TV in a room full of sleeping strangers. Everyone becomes strange when they are asleep. All the wrinkles of foreheads and lines round the mouths and all the wide eyes of the wide-awake days have disappeard with the chorus of catarrah in the lungs and the limp muscles of quiet people.

We are all ageless when we sleep. Our faces become unlined and smooth and depthless and timeless, but there is age there in the set of the face and the lapse of the body, and all the joys and sadness and cares of our lives so far resting in the set of the jaw and the upturn of a soft palm holding an unshaven chin.

There are coiled bodies under makeshift quilts of coats and jackets.

There is one of us reading quietly by the light of a tungsten filament, in a 40 watt peach bulb, in a calico lampshade.

The shadows of dark hair fall around the book and there is the leaf-rustle of a turned page. The title is invisible, turned as it is away from the light. A furrow in his bottom lip is lined with dried blood. There is a faint smudge of moisture on his palm where the sweat of the night has settled, and his thumb traces his jaw-line.

What news could reach us under the heavy warmth of so much silence? What tragedies could harm us under the net of narcosis? The man on the BBC murmurs reassuringly as flames rain down in the pictures behind his back. The slushy sibilants and faint Hampshire burr clash gently with the mugshots of pig-eyed close-cropped men in a police ident.

The electricity ran out at 4am when the bare bulb went dark, so we trickled coins into the meter and someone put the heating on and we fell asleep. One by one, people lay down where they sat, or slouched into limb-caverns, or slumped cross-legged on the floor. Your eyes wander over the recesses of dark-grained jaws and pale fore-arms clasped around skulls and shoulder-blades. Candle wax pools under globes of flame from four tea-lights on the mantelpiece.

Somewhere upstairs is the moan of a turning sleeper, and the faint hiss of Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads singing to itself on repeat.

You join up the pontillist cigarette burns on the muted shine of the walnut table, pale scratches in the finish like ochre whorls in an Aranda painting. There is an armadillo frozen mid-trot and the arc of an oak bough in the patterns before your mind fills up with white noise.

He is dreaming now. You can see it in the tensile framing of the face and the ripple of eyelids. All the spangled lights of chemicals nights when he was awake have dissolved into the creamy foam of the waters of the Bosphorus and the sky-drift of souk smoke as a single dreary Serbian strikes up the liturgy to himself under a soft sky. There is a velvet smell of incense and hot frying oil and diesel as the sun comes up and the dawn begins to settle on your skin. The faintest tremor of the District line morphs into the bass note of a cruise-ships horn. The Serbian raises his head to the papery clouds and exhales the ocean.

She is under a red-brick pavement and looking upwards through the lichen and dandelion fronds between the stones. There is the tread of boots and heels and the tension of insteps and the tottering of cautious walking-sticks and the rattle of pram wheels. She sleeps within her sleep and settles back into the clay.

He is walking on a Christmas morning on shale, with his eyes shrouded by saline mist. All there is the repititive crunch of shingle underfoot and the puff of lungs and the promise of the warmth of home, past the pier.

The morning broke around us and hibernal bodies unfolded as you and I snuck out the front door and walked out under a shadowing sky and ignited the days first roll-up. We walked to the shops quietly under thuggish clouds. I can't remember what we bought as we sifted through the flotsam of small-denomination coins we'd pinched from the living room table.

As we walked back, the rain shattered on our up-drawn hoods.

By the time we got back, people were stirring, and the kitchen was all fugged up with warming steam from the kettle as people sleepily placed their orders. Serried ranks of memorial tea-cups and discoloured sugar in a bone china pot. You fried eggs under a cobalt haze of oil with your back to me and rambled amiably and sighed repeatedly as I scalded my tongue happily with bitter unsweetened Nescafe.

From the living room, the murmur of voices, and we both smile as someone experimentally coughs the first line of Once In A Lifetime.