I’m telling you this because you can’t take it with you, he says, suddenly afraid the pretty nurse doesn’t understand. This is all he has to pass on and suddenly it seems so small. He has heard the words as if the first time – this was someone you were in love with - and he starts to laugh, but it is the same sort of laugh that he couldn’t stop from coming when the doctor explained to him why it was too late for chemotherapy, a laugh pulled up from a sublimely lonely place. The doctor, who he feels he has come to know better than some of the people he unwillingly calls friends, had tapped across a map of his digestive organs with the eye of an expert jeweller finding imperfections on a set of stones you thought were going to be your fortune. See this shadow on your liver? Our best guess is a haematoma but the whole thing is covered in cysts in any case; the function is critically impaired. Then there’s your pancreas - shot to shit if I’m frank. Kidneys are good for another few months though, and Bill had rolled on to his side on the leather sofa, laughing at his valiant renal system, laughing his way into a darkness that some of the worst people he has met wouldn’t know. He laughs that way now.
         It’s like a gift, Bill says to the pretty nurse, sobering down. Maybe some of the other goners give you something proper, watches maybe. Does that ever happen?
         She doesn’t answer, just holds his hand. You’re not a goner, she says softly.
         There was an owl hooting, he says. It hooted just at the bit where Romeo goes into the tomb. He says something about the lightning before death. That was my friend’s favourite line. If you’re ever imagining that night, don’t forget to put in the owl.

         The fluorescent strips spatter a yellow light that’s enough to depress a person into giving up the ghost, which is pretty much how Bill imagined it would be on this side of the ward. The feeling of moving underwater has returned, but this time he is definitely swimming, stroking out into the cosmos alone where he can’t feel the palsied motions of the Apollo 8 any more. He lets the anaesthetist

17

  

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