As an experiment, at the age of forty-one, I drew the letter C on the back of my left hand in thick permanent marker, and every time I looked at it, I asked myself, “Am I conscious?”

On the third night it entered my dreams. I crossed into a state of waking sleep. It felt dangerous.

I looked for my grandfather, who died in 1979. I asked, “Where is granddad?” and from deep within my consciousness he walked towards me in the heat haze of a hot summer day. I lengthened my stride along Charlton Lane towards him; I was unburdened. I was ten again.

Granddad was wearing a short-sleeved burnt orange shirt, light trousers, and brown shoes. As we approached each other, his spectacles came into focus, and I could see his gold watch with its black strap on his left wrist. We met right at the border of the two villages. I could make out his features, younger than I remembered. This was the past, but this could not have been the past: on my hand was the letter C. He smiled, and we hugged. He let go of me as though we did this every day. I tried to hold on. He didn’t speak, and neither could I.

We walked together back to his house – my home until he died. But no sooner were we in the door when he disappeared and left me alone.

Then I was in his purgatory, lost and out of control in the worst time of my life: he had been dead one week. The funeral was still to come. The English take so long to bury their dead.

I stared at Granddad’s old pipe. I reached out my hand and picked it up, putting it to my lips. Disappointingly, there was no woody smell of tobacco – a hint, though, of some familiar aroma, a faint echo of the all those Saturday afternoons waiting on football scores.

Granddad had showed me how to pack a pipe: he filled it three quarters full with ready rubbed tobacco and pressed it down gently with his forefinger, until the bowl was half full, then topped up the tobacco to nearly full, and compressed this down to two-thirds. Then he waited until the BBC’s Frank Bough said the words we waited for: “And now the results are coming in on the teleprinter.”

Granddad struck the phosphor tip of a short wooden match against the sandpaper on his swan vesta box, allow the head to burn away and catch light to the wood, and then in slow circling motions he would waft the match over the bowl of his pipe while he gripped the stem in the left side of his clenched mouth. He would close his lips over the pipe’s stem and draw his breath as one sucks a fizzy drink through a straw. The tobacco would glow red, and we had game on. Fixing our eyes on the screen:

League Division One, Liverpool 1 Bristol City 1, score draw.
League Division Three, Exeter City 3 Plymouth Argyle 2, home win.

Now the pipe was an object with no life. I gave it a go. I expected air drawn through a straw.

I didn’t bargain for the bitter liquid. I swallowed it straight down, belched and tasted my own stomach acid coming up to fill my cheeks. I swallowed again and fell back on the armchair. I had tasted my dead grandfather. Grandfather’s tongue had strayed too close to the mouthpiece opening and his spittle had seeped, drawn back, into the bowl of the pipe where it had sat for a week – or maybe nearly thirty years – soaking in the last of the nicotine gurgled through it.

I found a half-used bar of pink carbolic soap on the kitchen sink and was trying to wash out my mouth. I licked the fist-sized bar but it wasn’t enough. I stretched my mouth around it and forced it in. I sucked hard and gagged. Distracted by the taste in my mouth, I didn’t hear my long-dead Nan coming in from the funeral home. She caught me pink-handed; my heart failed and sent the bitter taste – and me – back to sleep.

I turned over in the bed and checked the luminous dial on my watch; it was 4:26am. This time I’d been gone for fifty-one minutes. Real time.