In one of his deliriums Bill worries about the floor in his conservatory, which for some years has taken on an unpleasant smell in wet weather, he thinks possibly from when the dog was a puppy and still had accidents at night. The floor had been concrete at the time, the puppy having torn up the linoleum almost as soon as he arrived, so the urine soaked the floor in bright, phosphorescent circles that faded to shadows in seconds. He pictures the dog, surprised by the orbs of its own piss as if in a strange corruption of another old fable about the moon, where its reflection causes a fool to believe it has fallen in to the lake. Bill imagines the fool striding into the cold, black water with a rope and harness, he feels the sudden freeze under his own skin and it’s a strange, feinting sort of plunge as he finally goes under, looking for the moon. When he wakes up, two nurses are bending over him, changing the sheets. Don’t leave it until the last minute next time, the Nigerian one says sharply. Press your buzzer. Or better still, keep the urinal where you can reach it.
         He looks out of the window and lets his eye follow the dark shapes that move towards and away from the glass like the coloured beads of a kaleidoscope. He watches the tree branches lunge down to the grass below and then rear, leonine, up into the night breeze, while the nurses roll and wipe and fold down an angry set of hospital corners. One of the shapes breaks free, and it seems that on the approach to the window some sharpness to the Autumn air is planing it down and down and down until it has angles, shadows and only in the last minute does the shape become a bird.
My dog, he says, in a hot fright. Who is looking after my dog? Then Ellen’s voice and a blurred tang of ten year old Glenfiddich as she leans across, missing his hand when she says, The dog’s dead, Billy-boy. He died, what, five years ago. We took his ashes up to Daymer Bay, do you remember?

         Can I tell you something? Bill asks the pretty nurse in the morning, surprised and glad to see that she is still on duty to prep and move him across the ward for surgery. He would

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