like to ask if there is any point to this latest procedure. More than that he would like to know whether or not he will even want the few extra months that carving out a section of his beleaguered liver might give him - but these are not medical questions, and Bill has been here long enough to understand that even consultants who use books as therapy will be unable, or unwilling to go into it. There is something else anyway, something subtler but more important that needs to be resolved, because the bottom line is that when he is on the table in two hours time there will be no magic, only science, which hasn’t got all the answers.
         The impulse to tell is as urgent as anything he has ever known. He recalls that so many people die on the toilet because the need to defecate and an impending heart attack feel very much the same, and a worry fires up in him that either one of these two things might be about to happen. But minutes pass and neither does, so it is just the need to get the words out after all. The nurse sits on the edge of the bed and looks at him expectantly. After all that he doesn’t know how to start. If I don’t tell you then it’s like - he tries, but Bill cannot verbalise his fear on the first go.
         I know what you’re saying, she says. It’s like if a butterfly flaps its wings.
         It is?
         No, it’s not! It’s something else. It’s like if a tree falls in a forest. If a tree falls and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?
         You break my heart, he wants to say, because suddenly it is clear that human existence comes down to no more than this, a seesaw from the sublime to the ridiculous where everything is either absurd or happening in such deep isolation that no-one notices the moment of collapse. But he does not say it. Instead he motions for the urinal, heeding last night’s warning.
         Wait, she says. Maybe it is the butterfly.

14

  

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