erithacus' saga: sleeping beauty

Eventually, the camp bed was up and on the floor, with only a height difference of 30 centimetres between the two ends. I brushed off the dust, motor oil and slug trails and sat down. Part of the rotten canvas ripped and I fell through on to the floor. To get a horizontal night’s sleep, I’d have to find some way of supporting my body and my head. The Rubens, torn into strips, was just the thing to patch up the canvas. I sat down again and this time it didn’t break.

I was hungry and thirsty but was too tired to collect the water coming in through the roof or to hunt down woodlice. Content to have something vaguely horizontal that was not the floor to lie half my body on, and a cosy ex-fertiliser bag in which to snuggle up, I lay down and managed to doze off.