FIVE HUNDRED MILES south, Cormac finished tidying up the common room, its plain walls looking duller than ever as the ribbons and fabric came down. Countless people besieged him to tell him what a great night they’d had; a few invited him for a drink or to go on up to their rooms, in the case of a particularly jovial bunch of Spanish nurses, all of them raving beauties out of their scrubs, and Yazzie, who’d been constantly trying to catch his eye.

He smiled blankly at them all, then went upstairs and fell asleep with the sound of the drums beating in his ears and the faint outline of the photograph—he tried drawing it but couldn’t make a fist of it—in his head.

There was a shy knock on the door. He opened it to Yazzie, the girl from downstairs who’d wanted to dance, and he felt suddenly lost, and empty, and sad, and homesick, and confused, and he let her in.

Chapter 47

Cormac couldn’t believe how hot it was. It was ridiculous, worse than Spain. Practically as bad as . . . well, he wasn’t going to think about his old job. But he disliked the heat, didn’t trust it. And London felt oddly feral when it got hot. The bins stank. The people were out in the streets more; you felt how crowded the city was, how constantly everyone managed to bubble along, but sometimes, it felt precariously close to boiling over. Cars with windows open blasted out incredibly loud music with rumbling bass lines you could hear coming a mile away. Groups of young people sat and drank pints on the sidewalks of the bars, looking for a place outside even when there wasn’t anywhere to sit, getting, sometimes, aggressive and yelling at the passing cars, who circled, shouting at the girls.

It was oppressive; Cormac had never known anything like it. There was no air-conditioning in the nurses’ home, so he managed to pry his window open, which meant all night he could hear police sirens screaming and helicopters going and voices and music and smell drifting barbecues. How, he wondered, could people live like this all the time, piled on top of one another, without going mad? He was naturally calm, but this was making him anxious, wound up. His patients were fretful, full of complaints about the hospital and their injuries and illnesses; for the housebound it was unpleasant—stuffy rooms in stuffy houses, dreaming of fresh air that was nowhere to be found. He tried to be particularly kind, to not get upset when the tar was practically melting on the roads, when drivers were screaming at each other, confronting each other in jams and accidents; the frustration was never far away, the shouts and howls.