It isn’t possible to rescue her from a hospital bed: when she comes to visit the change has occurred or it hasn’t. Bill’s own bad days are simple in comparison and centred mainly around intensive pain relief, but he cannot relieve Ellen of her pain and sometimes he is angry with her because she just seems to want to hold on to it all, and the intensity with which she does this is only possible because she doesn’t know real pain, just like he didn’t know real pain, and if she did he can only think she’d want to get the fuck out of the pit she’s been wallowing in for forty nine years. The truth of it is that his love for Ellen is no more than the relief that comes when he is done with being angry, but love is a terrible thing like that, Bill thinks, love of any kind is no better than some scavenger that comes laughing out of the dark to feast on the kill.
         On her next visit he says he’s worried she’s bit off-colour. Ellen Hare sweeps her hands, cupping the air in helpless parentheses by way of objection.
         I’m eating a lot of food out of packets, she says. That rice you do in the microwave? Maybe that’s it.
         Well you look like shit, love. When I get out of here there’s going to be some changes. You can’t live on microwave rice.
         It’s surprisingly good, she says and reaches for his hand from across the bed, holding it for a moment longer than is really required, because they both knew that although it is not yet impossible, it is increasingly unlikely that he will get out of here. A cellular blanket stretches out over the bed like the dim waters of the estuary he can see from his window at home and Ellen is distant, a dot in his eye, over on the other side just as she is in reality, in the house that was their grandparents’ on the better side of the river. Royalty visits Ellen’s side, as do film stars and the children of very rich people. But the estuary itself is just the visible statement of separation. Ellen has always been on the other side, although who is to say which side is the other and which the constant is anyone’s guess. Make sure you get your five a day, he tells her. Just do this one thing for me.

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