It is hard to tell because he isn’t even sure if this is sleep or a heightened state of wakefulness, but the pretty nurse is asking something. He only knows it is a question because her voice rises at the end of the sentence, but it doesn’t seem to stop, as though she has stepped off the sentence onto a ladder that has no end, climbing up and up and further and further away until all that exists of her is her voice, her question. Was that what you meant by the other world? she is saying, or it might be Are you comfortable? It occurs to Bill that her story has only made him realise that there are things happening all the time in places he doesn’t know by methods that would just never occur to a man like him, so perhaps it was exactly what he meant and also not what he meant at all. It is hard to be sure when he doesn’t know what he has been asked. Yes, yes, great, he says.
         A short woman he doesn’t recognise slams through the privacy curtain, followed by three students. We’ve got you on our emergency list for tomorrow, she says brightly, as if offering him front row seats for the first game of the season. Someone will be along later to talk through the risks with you.
         The last student in the line steps forward to ask if Bill’s next of kin are available.
         Risks? Bill says but he is barely audible and the woman doesn’t linger, sensing how all this grand despair seems to put off the students. They follow her across the central corridor and away in gauzy slow-motion to the other side of the ward. But the last student in the line turns back to Bill’s bed, patting his pockets as if he has lost something, a pen, or his desire to be in this shadowed place. Bill shuts his eyes and breathes into the prism of the oxygen mask, out, out, out. Suddenly all his thoughts become questions. His only need is to be heard. If his voice is heard, he is living, he will continue to live.

11

  

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