Judas woke up to the sound of his bedside clock getting its revenge for being swiped onto the floor on so many occasions. Louder and louder it screamed, and it would have carried on if Judas’s hand hadn’t emerged from underneath his dark blue John Lewis duvet cover and slapped it across the face. It managed just one more warbled cry, before it shut itself down.
Judas had pondered more than once: after waking someone up, do alarm clocks go to sleep? Do they watch the people they have tortured and just pulled from the safe, warm embrace of a 10-tog duck feather cloud of loveliness, as they hop on one foot around a cold room, disorientated and angry, and then chuckle?
Judas didn’t have the luxury of existential observations at that moment because a new alarm had taken the other’s place. Som
