Red squirrel

I am in bed back at Trysull road, the house where I grew up. I am in my parents bed, it is a huge, beautiful hardwood bed like a boat boat and I am lost in a sea of soft quilts along with my ex partner Steve. The scene is one of happy, safe and cosy domesticity rather than sexual.

A red squirrel appears, first at the window, then in the gulleys of the quilt, cautiously sniffing around. Gently I hold out my hand and coax it toward me. I notice it is wearing a very deep, brown leather collar - the collar is at least two inches wide and seems a bit excessive given the small size of the creature. I say to Steve "look, it has been tamed, someone must have been keeping it as a pet".

It comes to me and we start to make friends, I am playing around with it and it seems quite tame. But then it starts to hiss, to bite my hand - it's jaws open to a supernatural degree like the creature in alien. It then starts to attack my teddy bear (brown teddy, as old as I am to the day and held together by fragile threads of love) and I have a hard job parting them.

I continue to play with red squirrel but realise that the notion that she can be tamed is a false one and that the collar will have to come off.