In the early hours of the morning, way before the sky started getting light; Neil led asleep in his bed, hands held over his chest in the karma-enhancing prayer position he had slept in since his student days. He shifted a little and his hangdog expression contorted as the emotions of his dreams flitted across his face.

Listen, from where you are, you can hear their dreams …

"Cucumber sandwich, my dearest?" Neil asked, leaning over in his deck chair upon the tennis courts to offer the silver platter laden with neat triangle slices of bread to the pretty woman that sat at his side.

"Yes thank you, darling." The pretty woman smiled with perfect sliced-bread teeth, her diamond wedding ring catching the sun and glinting brilliantly as she reached out. She nibbled delicately upon her sandwich, watching her and Neil's children – two boys and a girl in a cute chequered frock – playfully thwacking a tennis ball back and forth between them.

"How did that meeting go this morning?" She asked after a while, shading her cornflower blue eyes against the afternoon sunshine.

Neil stretched lazily and ran a hand back through the short-ish ponytail his hair, unusually thick for a man of his age, had been combed back into it. "It went very well, my little honey bee. I thought maybe you'd like this to celebrate," and here he drew out a small but expensive looking jewellery box from inside his smartly pressed suit jacket.

The woman gasped and pressed her hands to her mouth in delight before reaching for the box and opening it. Inside glittered a string of freshwater pearls. "It's beautiful, thank you! But isn't it a little too expensive?"

"Not at all, not now that I've been promoted to head diplomatic relations official at the bank." Neil smiled at his wife's excited reaction, accepting her hug of congratulations and pecking her on the cheek. Idly, he thought back to his university days, the 'Unwashed Years' as Annette liked to call them. Who would have thought that that Peace Studies degree would have come in so useful when he finally bowed to his parents' wishes and took a job at the country's leading bank. He'd quickly become in charge of diplomatic relations due to his pacifistic stance and good-natured disposition, and the rest, as they say, is history. He'd always thought his parents heavy fascist pigs… but now he saw they'd only wanted him to do well and…

His thoughts were abruptly interrupted by the hysterical wails of his second oldest boy Reginald, who had caught the tennis ball with his eye instead of the racket.

Later that night, he lay in bed; Annette curled up to his side and snoring with light, easy breaths. Unlike most snorers, she actually sounded cute when she did it, more like a rustling little dormouse as opposed to the pig-like squelchings most people had to put up with from their partners, he really was very lucky to have her.

But still… he couldn't help feeling like he was… missing something. He'd felt like this for most of his adult life but he'd learnt to push the incoherent gnawing thought aside as there was nothing he could do about it, so that was what he did now.

Resurfacing from his mildly troubling contemplations, he found himself playing with one of his wife's hands, a loving gesture he'd adopted around her as second nature. She always wore her rings and her favourite necklace to bed, just one of those individual idiosyncrasies that adorn human nature, and now his fingertips were worrying at a new ring that he didn't recognise. He brought it up to his face in the half light of the room, his eyes coming into focus to register a small yet somehow bulky silver ring set with an emerald, Prince Camilla cut by the looks of it. He'd never have bought her something so tasteless, where had she got it from?

His brow creased slightly as he studied her face, serene with sleep. He'd just have to ask her about it in the morning, he supposed. Returning her hand to her side, he turned on his back away from her, fluffing up his pillow before resting his head upon it. Waiting for sleep to come, he watched the sleeping form of the other beloved in his life – his dog Woodstock, a handsomely powerful Yorkshire terrier and faithful best friend. He'd do anything for that dog, and Woodstock would do anything for him, the perfect friendship, and perhaps the only true one he'd ever had. Eventually, he dropped off to sleep.

He woke up early, considering the amount of time it had taken him to get to sleep the night before, but the space beside him was already empty. He got up and gave a stretch, Woodstock bounding over and nipping playfully (although hard enough to draw blood) at his ankles as he swung a rich towelling dressing gown on over his silken pyjamas.

"Good boy," Neil smiled, stooping down to affectionately smooth Woodstock's head, tickling him behind his sleek ears. The dog yipped gratefully, bit his owner's hand, then scampered off downstairs in a bundle of fluff and pink ribbons in search of breakfast.

Shortly, Neil came down the stairs to join the rest of his family and dog, sucking on his bleeding finger. He paused at the foot of the stairs, hearing the low hum of his wife speaking on the phone. Wondering who she could be talking to this early, and the image of the strange ring on her finger surfacing in his mind, he crept closer to the living room door, tilting his head to listen.

"…No, he doesn't know. Yes, I'm sure… He just thinks I'm going to an elephant polo convention this weekend. I'll see you then… no, I love you more, no I love you more."

Neil backed away from the door, his eyes widening in shock and horror. "Heavy, oh heavy… why is it always me?" He moaned forlornly, then tripped over the small form of his daughter hurtling up the stairs. As he landed painfully on his buttocks, her hurried cry of 'sorry, Dad!' floated down to him.

He sat there, momentarily winded by the shock of the hard wooden floor greeting his behind so suddenly, when he felt a shooting pain in his left arm.

"Oh no…" He muttered, clutching at his heart which was now starting to give him no uncertain amount of trouble, his breathing shortening to gasping breaths. He heard the living room door opening and his wife's screams through a rapidly greying haze, little wispy memories of his life surfacing in the mist and scudding lazily across his inner eye.

He thought wistfully of his student days spent lounging around with harrowing boredom hanging over his head, the suicide stunts… ah, the good old days. He longed to once again feel the cold smack of a frying pan in the face, or to be the butt of a certain punk's latest 'joke', be called boring by a pompous anarchist or to dig for oil under the tyrannical rule of the house's diminutive leader. It was thoughts like this that accompanied him into his own personal, but rapidly darkening world, before everything went black and he knew no more.