Stephen got up one morning during a hot July. He always woke up around the same time, because the noise of commuters driving past his bedroom window became too loud. Like every other day since his mother died, Stephen didn't have to go to work. She had left him a sum of money that allowed him to buy his small house, with plenty left over for food, essential household maintenance and the assistance of a solicitor in managing his mother's estate.

He went downstairs and picked up the large pile of post that had, as usual, arrived on the doormat, and placed the letters neatly on the table to read over breakfast. After boiling some eggs and switching on a classical radio station, he began working through them. They were all from the local government, written in official language, with a lot of references to Stephen's expected co-operation in a matter of great public importance. Some of the letters were long, containing annexes with detailed instructions for how Stephen could make his views on the subject at hand known to the council. When he finished breakfast, he placed the letters in one of several metal cabinets he had bought specially to file them. The cabinets filled up most of his lounge. Stephen worried about the letters because he had not had time to read them all.

After breakfast, Stephen went back into the kitchen and put the salt out of reach on a high shelf. As he washed up his plate and cup, he looked out the window at a pile-up on the road outside his house involving cars, a double-decker bus and assorted motorcycles, scooters and cyclists. The emergency services had arrived and were clearing up the debris so that normal service could be resumed. This was a common feature of Stephen's morning, and he was generally impressed at the efficiency with which the wreckage was dealt with.

Stephen's house was next to the East Newstead Roundabout. The roundabout was in a boring suburb of South-West London, mainly known as a necessary route between the city centre and the endless boring commuter towns beyond, but it had one unusual feature. It was a geometrical anomaly in road planning, and in living memory no-one had been able to determine what shape it was or how many exits it had. This caused accidents as drivers became confused and distracted by multiple lanes of traffic coming from peculiar angles. The roundabout was a source of grumbling for locals, who were often delayed by the accidents, and also felt it unsightly. Party political leaflets tended to feature it as an important local issue that councillors promised to address. It had become known as ‘Henry', after its initials E.N.R. Following a large statistical study of the danger posed by Henry, economists from the Department of Transport had determined that the country would experience a net benefit if a mini-roundabout could be built to pacify traffic around the junction next to Stephen's house. Consequently an official order had been put on Stephen's house, in which the council would buy the house, demolish it, and build the mini-roundabout in its place.

On this morning, a councillor was coming to visit Stephen to discuss the matter. He had telephoned Stephen the previous week and offered to visit as a gesture of goodwill, to show that the council took his interests seriously. Stephen was glad of this – he had not fully understood the letters, and there were a number of matters that he needed to address. In particular, he didn't know when he would have to leave his house and the amount of compensation he would receive. Before the councillor arrived, Stephen made the necessary preparations for a visitor. He put on some reasonable clothes and tidied up the lounge. He placed several of the most important letters on the table, so he could refer to them if necessary during the interview. He checked that the salt was properly out of reach.

Since his teens, Stephen had had an urge to pour salt into people's eyes. He knew that, were he to do this, osmosis would cause extreme dryness in the victim's eye, leading to discomfort, and the act itself would be socially unacceptable. Visiting cafes where salt is readily available in easy-to-pour containers, and customers sit around with unguarded eyes, was impossible.

The councillor arrived soon after breakfast. When Stephen opened the door, the councillor harrumphed a warm "hello!" and Stephen invited him in. He was in his fifties, and wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He smelt of pipe tobacco, stale alcohol and aftershave. He wore thick-rimmed glasses and carried a battered old briefcase. He was a cliché.

Once he had squeezed past the cabinets and sat down at the table, the councillor immediately launched into a monologue. "Mr. Stairs, the council is pleased that you are understanding towards the improvements we are making to the roads in this ah…", he said, and during a lengthy pause took a pipe from his inside jacket pocket, and began gently compacting tobacco in the bowl, "…local community. You will have received our, ah, letters, I presume, and I'm sure you can appreciate that we have to make difficult compromises in all our daily business". He looked into the unlit pipe bowl.

Stephen controlled his impulse with practiced, calm breathing. He accepted his imagination's detailed images of table salt pouring into the councillor's eye and didn't dwell on them. He ignored his mind's suggestions that he start engineering a way to bring some salt into the room. The councillor carried on talking.

"That's why I wanted to make a personal visit. I'm here to make sure that your needs are accommodated in our plans…". He rambled on generically, spouting various platitudes and bureaucratic nonsense. Eventually he asked Stephen if he had any questions.

"I did wonder when I would have to leave my house", Stephen asked.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Stairs, I didn't follow. Would you mind repeating yourself?"

"I thought you wanted to buy my house – when is that going to happen?"

"As our letters lay out, there are full and detailed plans for this important project, and they are open to the public and available in the designated council repositories. We are doing everything we can in the interest of you and your local community. That brings me to a matter I would like to discuss with you – the letters." The councillor glanced quickly down at the letters stacked on the table in front of Stephen, and his breathing quickened slightly. "Have you been reading them?"

"Well, yes, I've done my best", Stephen started, and was going to say how difficult it was to keep up with them, but the councillor interrupted him.

"Tell me, Mr. Stairs, did you like the letters?" the councillor asked, and, having lost interest in his pipe, which now lay on the table, started fingering the corners of the envelopes. "Did you understand the letters we sent you about the proposal to build flowerbeds next to the new mini-roundabout?", he asked, loosening his tie and opening the top two buttons of his flannel shirt. "We take great care in our communications with the public", he said, in a hoarse voice; almost a whisper.

"Let me make you a cup of tea", Stephen said, since he was becoming frustrated and hoped that he might be able to move the conversation on when he returned. "Do you take sugar?" he asked from the kitchen, and when he turned back and looked through the door at the councillor, he noticed he had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with a beige cloth. All Stephen had to do was climb up on a stool and it would be a matter of seconds before he was discharging the salt pot into the councillor's naked watery eyes. The urge was frightening and unbearable, and Stephen had to walk straight back into the lounge and ask the councillor to leave. Stephen was so shaken at almost failing to control his urges that he did not dare to leave his house for the rest of the day.

It was already hot when the traffic woke Stephen the next morning. He had planned to cycle to the nearby high street to buy a TV guide and some new lightbulbs. Once the rush hour was over he left the house. As soon as he cycled out of his front gate and onto Henry, a car swerved out of one of the lanes of traffic and collided with him. He felt a series of thumps in different parts of his body and unusual stretching of his joints. The tarmac was at an eccentric angle. He lay on Henry's wide, confusing surface. A uniformed police officer was standing somewhere in Stephen's field of vision, directing the cars around the accident. He said some random words into his walkie-talkie: "hotel, seven, x-ray", then: "fire on the E.N.R., please send a fire engine as quickly as possible", and carried on directing the traffic. In no more than a couple of minutes, a fire engine arrived, the firemen got out, hosed Stephen down with a powerful hose and placed him on the pavement outside his house. During the incident, a tailback had accumulated on the road that ran beside Stephen's house and joined onto the roundabout.