do what he has to, stares up at the fading strips. There is some mild concern about his clotting levels but his kidneys are still good, which really is funny. Bill has never seen the point in the expression funny ha ha or funny peculiar. Even before he was diagnosed it seemed to him that most things are pretty peculiar, that so much consequence should be attributed to a life system that is only the result of random catastrophe after all.
         Your sister is in the relatives’ room, the pretty nurse mouths from the door and he shakes his head fast, God no, feeling a sudden panic that Ellen will come in and this odd little illusion he has created for himself will be ruined. See you on the other side then, she says, turning to follow the anaesthetist, but Bill isn’t done, won’t let her go. He doesn’t want to see what is on the other side. Sit with me, he says. He wants her to know what it felt like to be standing out on the road at dusk, right there next to Stephen Hopkins, and in one crazed moment he wants her to find Stephen Hopkins and bring him here to this hospital, the middle aged man that will be Stephen Hopkins sitting here with the old man that is William Hare, F347008. Instead, by some mean, alchemical process it comes out as: A girl your age doesn’t know about love.
         The nurse won’t accept this to be true. I happen to be in love this very minute, she says.
         What are you, twenty? Twenty two?
         Nineteen, she rounds up.
         Then you don’t know about love.
         That’s such a cliche, she says, and her face tightens so quickly into an approximation of womanhood that he suspects she has to do this just to buy a lottery ticket.
         

18

  

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