I dreamed about Miles Halloran again last night – not as he was in the hour of his violent death, but as he appeared at the start of our friendship, when I spotted him on that overheated beach in Puerto Rico. In my dream, he had that quality of specialness that had attracted me at once. The other sunbathers might have seen a tall man, well into middle age, with a too slender body, hair of relentless gold and a manner best described as all-points-alert, but I saw someone else. Someone who wasn’t afraid to be stared and giggled at, who was inviolate in his self-esteem, who had clearly lived many lives in many places.

In the dream, we stood again at the thatched hut where they sold soft drinks and rancid chicken and watched a young man doing gymnastics for the benefit of his girlfriend. And once again, Miles remarked, “He’s courting her with cartwheels, he’s rolling over her heart with his feet in the air and his palms on the ground.” And once again I laughed and decided this outrageous personage was someone I wanted to know better.

The dream ended, as all dreams do, before it had really finished. I reflected that whoever planted the dreaming capacity in us had a rotten sense of form. Miles would have done better – he rarely left a tale unfinished and if you complained he’d finish it for you on the spot. But then, he was a professional spinner of tales. The only story for which he couldn’t find the perfect ending was his own.

But I’m getting ahead of my tale, which Miles never did. I will begin at the beginning.