It’s after midnight. Night time has two advantages. First, there are fewer people around, so I cause less bother. When I can, I sleep in the daytime. People without a home are less offensive when they’re asleep. Second, the air is cooler.

       Valencia is sickeningly hot this summer, the heat a belt strapping itself around you, finding the next hole, closer to your body, closer and tighter, hotter and hotter. 

          Two beads of sweat run down my neck as I lean against the back wall of Parilla y Sol. I fork a chunk of steak fat, then chew it slowly, my dry mouth taking a while to form saliva. In exchange for my taking their bin bags to the rubbish and recycling centre three miles away, the owner leaves out a plate of rejected food once or twice a week.

          My eyes flick to the right as a wild, barbaric squawk pierces the air. I haven’t heard a noise like that for thousands of years. I look expecting to see a bird, but at the back of another of the restaurants there are around a dozen tree squirrels.

          In the faint glow from nearby all-night ice-cream parlours and off-licences, I see small pieces of bread dotted on the ground. The squirrels are fighting for the food, nipping at each other’s tails, and clawing at cheeks when one of them grabs a piece. The heat is doing strange things to animals.

          Three teenage boys emerge in front of me, a pool of grey smoke whirling around their heads. They pass a cigarette to each other, kicking a football against the wall.

          ‘Hey, bet you wouldn’t eat off that plate!’ says one, poking at the smallest boy’s ribs.

          ‘Naaah, that’s nasty!’

          ‘Wait, you owe us a dare remember,’ says the third. ‘You wouldn’t take that guy’s fags the other night.’ He kicks the ball and it smacks against the wall a few inches from my side.

          I look down at my plate. Two chunks of fat left. I stand up carefully in order to not drop the food, grabbing my backpack, and start heading down the alley to the footpath.

          ‘Oi, mister,’ says the first, ‘my mate needs some of your food.’

          Then that strange, wild noise again. I turn back to see one of the squirrels perched on its hind legs. It leaps forward, clawing a paw into the face of another nibbling bread. Suddenly I remember where I’ve heard that noise before.

*

A sort of monkey – what humans now refer to as the bald uakari. We called them the dangers. You would land in the Amazon jungle, having swooped down, the happy feeling of air trickling along your belly and the underside of your wings, ready to find an insect after a successful day’s migration.

          Then you’d see it: an angry sunburn-red face, glowing orange eyes ringed by blackness and shining like crazed marbles. That strange, grey, old-man hair, unkempt and wild around its face. And its body: at once sculptured and flabby. It would keep its mouth open, staring at you. You didn’t know whether they wanted to eat you, or whether they were so offended by your presence that they were waiting for you to leave.

          Sometimes we had travelled for hundreds of miles that day, and we needed to eat just like they did. But those creatures had evil ideas: they decided they needed the same insects we were after, when they could just as easily climb for fruit or nuts to crack.

          My youngest son was perched in front of me, flapping his wings happily, excited by the prospect of a meal. The danger was in the tree behind him. My elder son was beside me, tightening his wings against his chest, his head bowed. He twiddled his head at me, asking scared: What do we do? Then that noise from the tree – that horrible, wild noise. The danger wanted us.

*

A punch interrupts my memory. Taking a beating as a human is a strange thing: in every other form you know it likely means death. And the pain won’t last long. But as a human, while the pain is being inflicted, you know it will last. The boys’ chuckles echo and ring as the blows to my head and ribs distort my sense of sound.

          When I wake, perhaps an hour later, I’m not sure whether the echoes are from inside my head or from far off in the distance. After two months of this exhausting summer, I am still not used to the night sky being accompanied by such heat, your organs screaming at the outside world to give them some rest.

          The left side of my face lies on the gravelly floor and my eyes circle trying to spot the plate. It lies empty apart from a few rodent hairs. One of the chunks of steak is lodged in a pile of dung. I stare at the pile of crap, and remember moving around in a more acceptable form.

*

Humans have all these preconceptions of poo, viewing it as something unmentionable and unpalatable. But my days as a dung beetle were some of my finest. All day I pushed dung, gathered a pile until it was six times the size of me, then pushed more dung, piled dung until the day was all but done, slept, then woke to push more poop.

          When I was that beetle, I never took any pride in the amount of poo I rolled around. Now that I’m a human, I recognise it for the immense achievement it was. That’s one thing about being a human: you think. This occasionally makes the good things better, and more often makes the bad things worse.

*

I spend parts of the day down alleyways, finding pockets of sleep in the shade. And more hours in the Turia gardens, which stretch through the city, thirty or so feet below street level, where a river once ran. I walk among the many trees, some big, hanging heavy, droopy like sleepy broccoli florets, and others thin and pale like ice-lolly sticks, dotted with darker splodges of brown.

          I lean against a favourite tree, watching the path swell with dozens of tourists, locals and police officers. The police have been more present this summer, after the early weeks of punishing heat set off abnormal rates of public arguments and violent crime. In ordinary times, people would avoid me, leaving a vast space.

          But today there’s a mere metre between me and one of the many families sitting cross-legged on the grass. The parents’ backs are turned, and the woman’s long, chestnut-brown hair is flung over one shoulder with a rubber band tying it together. There’s a bright splodge of blonde located randomly towards the bottom, and it sparkles in the sun.

*

India, two and a half million years ago. Through dense trees, beyond the rest of my lion tribe, I see two burning bulbs of yellow. They gradually creep through the tall brown-green grass, edging a hair left, right, slowly, ever so slowly getting bigger. Whatever this is, it’s coming towards us. I push myself up, and stand on heavy, tired legs. The rest of my pack is flat on their bellies after a long hunt and cherished feast. My position alerts them, and they shift their tired gazes to follow my eye line, then almost immediately they stand, joining me in following the two splodges of shining yellow.

          The spots get bigger, and bigger, and through gaps in the grass, just for one fraction of a second, and soon another, we see patches of a deep brown-black colour. We keep track of the yellow splodges. Soon, we realise the yellow is eyes.

          A black panther emerges. It walks loosely, elegantly through the last of the shorter, thinner grass. Between us is a much-worn patch, once thick with some of the tallest grass and now a dusty home to our tribe’s rest periods. About thirty feet of dirt lies between one of my lion cousins and the panther. 

           My cousin turns towards me, standing tall, muscles wound tight. He’s ready to fight. His eyes widening, he waits for my go-ahead, reassurance. I look back at the yellow eyes, and I want to hold them, want to be swallowed by them, want to run away with them. Turning back to my cousin, I realise he’s about to run.

           When you live in the wild, the most important decisions must be the quickest. Whether to run, whether to chase, give up, fight back. My cousin took more time than usual, but only a second more. Something about those yellow eyes make him want to move, to run. And something about those yellow eyes make me want to abandon my family.

          A second after my cousin starts running towards the panther, my other cousin joins him, then my sister, brother, nephew and four friends. I start running too, not knowing whether I’m trying to run with my family or with the panther. Soon we’re in the tall, brown-green grass, moving with power and energy, adrenaline bulldozing through our veins and making us forget we have only recently hunted and expended so much effort.

          We’re not as quick as the panther. It jets away from my cousin, who is at the front of the tribe. I am older, stronger, a little quicker than him. I gain speed after ten feet, and soon I’m at the front. My cousin roars – he senses something’s wrong, and he keeps on running behind me. Another ten feet, and another, and after a minute, maybe two, his footsteps, and my cousins’ and siblings’ and friends’, slowly quieten. They quieten some more, until they disappear.

          I must keep sight of the panther. With its yellow eyes turned away from me, only occasionally can I make out a flash of that brown-black. It’s too quick. I lose sight. The grass goes on, and on, and I know it will stretch for miles yet. I stop. And then I roar. My roar is a cry, a call. Something tells me that if I stop, the panther will stop too. 

          I’m in one of the areas of shorter grass, which still reaches the bottom of my neck. My heart beats heavily, thumping against my side. I wait. Footsteps – maybe my brother has caught up – and then calm breathing. I smell something clean and flowery. The panther. I see its two yellow eyes. It comes closer, revealing its dazzling and immaculate black fur, until it’s just a few feet away. We look at each other, and then it turns, waiting for me to join its side. Then we run together, through the grass, hearts beating side by side, and for the rest of my days as a lion I forget I am a lion, forget I ever was, and I run together with the panther, with those burning yellow eyes. Every day getting to look deep inside them, and imagine myself falling into them, being swallowed and held by them, and every day we run through the grass and up the hills and towards the lake, stopping and swimming, then run some more, up more hills and further away, further and further away from that patch of dirt.

*

‘Hairy! Hairy man!’ One of the children, a boy of two or three years old, is facing me. ‘Hairy man!’ the child repeats, giggling. He takes two little steps towards me before the mother grabs his arm to a yelp from the child, and when she ungrips him, there is a stark red mark on his thin arm.

          Soon afterwards, two bare-armed police officers, wearing this summer’s uniform – thin black vests with the city’s crest embroidered with cotton – ask me to vacate the tree in order to make space for another family.

          I return in the late evening, after the sun has set but its fire pool of heat still swims in the air, and the gardens are much quieter. Small crowds of drinking teenagers with scooters, and some younger children with footballs, dot the gardens. I find a favourite tree to lean against and try to settle into a sleep before waking for the night, when most everyone will have gone home.

            I wake to a wet, warm feeling on my back. The wetness soon fills much of the left side of my back, that which is not touching the tree. I sleepily wonder whether a rare rain could have fallen, and contemplate looking up at the sky, before the smell of urine floods my nostrils. I push my left elbow against the tree, and turn around to see a tall, skinny man running in uneven zigzags towards the path where his friends stand chuckling.

          The lamps from the street above show glimmers of their faces, tired but giddy eyes, most of them holding bottles and cans. They look eighteen, nineteen, some of them older. 

          I get up and carry my backpack in my right hand, and head to the nearest fountain to wash.

*

The next day, in between hot, sweaty sleeps, I am wandering through the well-worn streets of El Carmen. New, unfinished street murals have been abandoned by heat-stricken artists. I walk past the apartment buildings, at once modern and old-fashioned, with strange gold-green and pink-white walls above the lower floors of blue and grey. The silver-railed balconies still hang plants and flowers, but they have long since wilted, their residents having put limited water to better use.

          Some of the older cars parked on the left side of the street have been there for weeks without moving, most people this summer reluctant to spend time trapped inside something unless it’s equipped with modern air conditioning.

          Two young brothers, wearing backwards caps, one sky blue and the other lime green, throw a basketball to each other in a slow-motion fashion, their eyes repeatedly drooping shut before flashing open at the heavy splat of the ball bounced against the pavement. I reach a public square that often swarms with people drawn to the shade created by densely packed apartments and a row of tall, far-reaching bright green trees.

          It has become common to see people sitting on the ground, unfussed by dog muck and circling squirrels. I have to choose my walking speed and any pauses carefully: people have started welcoming impromptu gatherings of folk like themselves, but still cast a dirty eye on the homeless.

          The square is particularly brimming today, and a large crowd gathers close to one of the walls on which people often sit. I hear the strange, creepy sound of a twinkling and distant piano, obscured by unpredictable crashes of what sounds like metal, combining to form something like a drumbeat – only looser, freer. I spot a well-tanned man through a crack in the crowd, shirtless and wearing long, baggy red shorts and white trainers. He has perched two large speakers on the wall he stands in front of, and as another crack emerges I see him handing out leaflets.

          There’s a burst – a piercing, beautiful burst, a note I cannot imagine anyone has ever heard before, and it goes on and on. And for some time – I don’t know whether seconds or minutes – I am still, and I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t need to remember any other time, because I am perfectly well right here.

          But then the forever ends. The beautiful sound fades, and the crashing metal percussion continues.

          A pair of police officers weave their way through the crowd gathered for the music. The street is swollen with passers-by and I know I will get told to leave soon. Before I turn, two girls cheerily yell, ‘Alondra! Alondraaa!’ I soon find a deserted alleyway, but I’m too shaken by that blissful, unignorable sound to sleep.

*

In the evening, I go back to the same square, hoping to come across the sound again. The streets are quieter, and when I reach the square, it is mostly silent but for a few passing cars on the nearby road. But there is something on the ground near the wall where the man had the speakers perched. One of the leaflets. In big and bold, italicized lime green letters, it reads:

           ALONDRA GUERRERO

           SPECIAL SURPRISE CONCERT

          ESTADI D’ATLETISME DEL TURIA

          10PM

If Alondra was responsible for that beautiful sound – the one I had been trying to recreate in my head over and over, but couldn’t quite grasp, for it was like nothing else – then I must head to Turia, and the football ground with just two-hundred seats, where I may get to hear it again.

            The walk there flashes by, and I’m soon at grey-white steps heading down to the gardens. I hear faint music a few hundred metres away from the ground. Soon, I see the blue running track which circles the football pitch. Hundreds of people are gathered on the pitch in front of an impromptu stage, with large black speakers, a drum kit, a bassist, and a pianist in front of a maroon grand piano. To one side of the drums I see a woman with long blonde hair holding a saxophone. Alondra. She faces away from me, towards the crowd.

          I approach the running track but then see a dozen or so security guards; most of them stand either side of the stage, there is one at the back – a particularly brutish-looking man, his tanned bald head reflecting one of the nearby floodlights – and others are dotted around the edges of the crowd.

*

I find a spot near the back of the crowd with not too many people concerned by me, everyone looking to the stage. The drummer plays a drooping then suddenly energetic groove. It’s like he’s flitting in and out of a sleep, waking up with bursts of energy, over and over. There are strange pauses, and you wonder for a split second whether he’s forgotten the next beat, but he fills in again at the perfect time.

          I stare at Alondra, who stands perfectly still with her eyes shut. Something about the way she holds herself makes me feel like I’m forgetting something. Finding myself walking forward through small gaps in the crowd, I hear people murmur and feel them shrug away. Alondra takes a step towards the microphone, lifting her saxophone a little higher, her eyes closed.

          She plays that piercing, beautiful sound, and I drift off into an unthinking, humanless place, with no thoughts or words. I float on top of the sound in a daze, forgetting time, forgetting where I am and what I’m looking at. Then just as it did earlier, the apparent foreverness suddenly stops.

          Alondra takes the saxophone from her mouth, breathes in deeply, her chest expanding and she stands straight, then, keeping her eyes shut, she crooks her neck to her left, towards the bassist, who plucks a dark, brooding rhythm, ba-DUM-dummm… ba-BAAAAAA… babababa-da-dummmmmmm… and the drummer continues with the same, strange sleepwalker beat. Alondra plays a falling staircase of notes, tumbling, tumbling, swimming through the river of bass and drums, and though she plays so many notes, all so quickly, they are all distinguishable, all so soft, and fragile. They play for a few minutes, perhaps much longer, and then Alondra opens her eyes.

          And I remember.

*

Seventy two thousand years ago. There is a beautiful creature ten metres ahead of me. We are animals related to you – you could almost call us human. We’re walking towards a small mountain.

          Above the hill, a sickly yellow-grey sky has been slowly darkening for the last hour. Orange and red clouds with patches of blue-grey in the centre of each of them, grouped together in a loose zigzag shape, swirl and dance into a fleeting, ever-shrinking space, escaping from the sky, and soon they disappear, swallowed into a hole by some distant world, leaving behind only the darkening sky.

          The mountain is only fifty metres away now, and it stretches for about as wide as we can see, with thirty or forty black silhouettes of trees spread along the top. As we get closer we can see their sad hanging leaves on branches that appear too thin to hold them. The tops of the trees waver slightly, bobbing up and down slowly in the wind.

       The creature in front of me stops. She turns and faces me with eyes sparkling yellow, like no other eyes. Except – they are like something else. And sometimes I almost capture the memory, but it isn’t until I’m born into another body that I can relate the two. Nobody else in our tribe has seen eyes like hers before. We have been out here away from everyone, for days, looking for food. We have found nothing.

       But the energy in her eyes keeps me walking on, towards the hill, towards that sickly yellow-grey sky, towards those trees, thinking maybe there’s something there, a fallen bird’s nest, a wounded animal, a hive with honey not too far out of each, and I know that I can keep going.

*

The impatient fizzle in my legs brings me back to the present moment, and Alondra. I stare at her, and wait for her to stare back. Her eyes flick around the crowd, a slow smile forms, and then just as she brings the saxophone back up, close to her lips, and she begins to shut her eyes, about to start the next song, she finds me.

       Alondra holds her instrument in place, and we look at each other, my legs bubbling, pulsing, and it is all I can do not to run towards her. I don’t know what would happen if I started, if I just ran, ran straight to her, and we look at each other for a few moments more, before soon the audience start murmuring, expecting Alondra to play, and then shouts – ‘What’s happening?’, ‘Alondra!’ – and she makes the first movement. Dropping her saxophone lower, Alondra slowly unstraps it from her shoulder, and we continue to share a stare.

       More and more of the crowd turn back and forth between us. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘What’s up with her?’

       Out the corner of my eye, as I refuse to look away from Alondra, I see the bassist start to walk over. He whispers something to her, just behind her neck, away from her instrument’s microphone. Alondra lays the saxophone on the ground, crouching, her yellow eyes filling my body.

       Then Alondra runs.

       She darts to her right, off the stage, heading towards two security guards. I finally look away from her and try to catch the guards' expressions, wondering what will happen. I have to join her. I turn, and run, pushing through the crowd. Through the confused people, brushing past more shouts of ‘Alondra!’ and ‘What the hell?!’

       Then they decide, the crowd all decides as one, that Alondra is not running towards me, for me, to join me, and I am not running to run together – they decide she’s running away from me, and I’m running to catch her. The confusion turns to anger, and the crowd acts.

       First a few men near the back get ready to block my path, then others closer to me start tugging, trying to grab my waist, my shoulders. I race past a bald, cube-headed man who throws a punch. How far away is Alondra? I’m thrown off balance by more grabs and punches, I stumble, then gain even footing again and sprint towards the row of men at the back of the crowd – nine or ten of them now, another five or six behind, ready to stop me, to fight me, to kill me? I have to keep going.

       Suddenly I catch sight of Alondra’s long blonde hair – she’s at the back of the crowd, close to the men forming the barricade, and they’re staring at me, blind to Alondra. ‘Hey!’ she shouts, and I remember her voice from thousands of years ago – her voice has the same warmth of a fire starting after you’ve fought a blizzard, of a teaspoon of honey after a week without food or water. I want to freeze, to be held by the sound, to be cradled and enveloped by more of her words.

       The men turn around, all recognising Alondra’s voice, and with them all turned, confused to see her there, I escape, running towards the path. I run, run, knowing that – hoping that, no, knowing that – Alondra will join me. Twisting my head, I try to catch a glimpse of her, and then I reach the path, and stop. I wait. A few heart-thumping moments pass, before Alondra emerges through the drooping bright green trees. There she is – so close – and the noise of the security guards approaching doesn't bother me as I breathe in, trying to slow down and savour the moment. I stare at Alondra’s burning yellow eyes for as long as I can until the guards are just ten metres away. Then we run.

       We run through the gardens, side by side, knowing that we need do nothing else, forever. We run, and run, and run. And for once I don’t have to remember. I can simply be.