A night out of hell

The past 48 hours have not been good. Our second night in the house. It is two o'clock in the morning. I deduce that the air-conditioning unit does not work, since I have been trying to sleep for two hours but am kept awake by a sense of imminent suffocation. My room is hotter than a Finnish sauna. I have one electric socket at the opposite end of the room to my bed. I decide to reposition the electric fan by plugging it into an extension lead (bought for a dollar in the Pencil supermarket) so that I can at least feel the faint breeze it produces as I lay in a pool of sweat on the bed. I push the plug into the socket, the lights flicker and go out and I receive a shock. I can smell burning plastic. I step on the electric cable in my bare feet. The plastic coating is molten and I burn the sole of one foot. I pull the lead out of the wall. The house is pitch black.

i send a text message to Julie downstairs to see if she is awake. She has had enough of her own little hell as well. She proposes to go back to the hotel and sort it all out in the morning.

It is 3am. The Goldiana Hotel has two windowless rooms to offer. I have been in bed for about 15 minutes. The queasiness that has troubled me since the afternoon returns in full force. I spend the rest of the night sitting on the loo with my head over the sink. It is a good job the bathroom is so small that you can reach the sink from the sitting position. I wonder what I am doing here.