The pretty nurse comes to his bedside with a tray, the usual syringes; clexane, diazepam, and a few empty phials for bloods. Cocktail hour, he murmurs and she bends over him, but only to pick up his arm and conduct the necessary formalities.
         William Hare, she reads, holding his wrist and checking the name against the pad on the drugs trolley. Hospital number F3467008.
         That’s me, he says. Most people call me Bill, love, but for you I’ll make an exception. F34 is fine.
         Well F34, she says. I’m just going to give you your sedative. Would you assume the foetal position and lift your top buttock, please?

         The intimacy of these relationships startles him. These are girls who have seen inside you from every angle and there is no preparation, no forty minutes in front of the mirror to get ready for this kind of show. Nobody warns you about this when you are twenty-five. One day there will be strangers looking at your body, putting cameras inside you to rummage through the orchid pink gullies of your lower intestines, and when your veins collapse and someone comes running to flush them out, you will feel the same humiliation as losing an erection. Now that Bill would have liked to have been told. There was a time, before his legs became too weak to make the journey down to the hospital concourse, when he sank two pints of Pepsi in ten minutes and the bag covering his gastrostomy exploded across two tables. The need to make his own mistakes, and by this he meant the grand rebellion of choosing his own diet, had been voracious, and he couldn’t think why he had wanted to drink so much and so quickly. The unfortunate nurse who found herself first on the scene hooked him back up without a fuss but for Bill, horrified by an image of a girl in the neighbouring seat groping in his stomach juices and cola for her purse, that has never been the end of it. He can picture the purse now, some sort of geometric print and glistening, washed across the floor in the tide.
         Humour a dying man, can’t you? he says, bracing himself against the cold sting of the hypodermic. Tell me a story. Any story.

6

  

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