“Tell him to look out the window,” said Cormac, not wanting another fainting on his hands. Zlobdan promptly did so, as Mergim started shaking. Cormac leaned his arm on his patient’s leg to keep it still and deftly pulled the metal stitches cleanly through the nerve-dead flesh. There was a little threading in and out, but the entire process was finished in less than a minute.

When Zlobdan announced to the room that he was finished, there was a pause—and then a huge round of applause. Mergim burst into tears; the rest flooded in, and Cormac found himself picked up and hugged. The bottle was offered to him, and he found it quite difficult to refuse. He told Zlobdan to explain that he had to drive a car, and Zlobdan thought that worrying about drinking before driving a car was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. One of the men produced a drawing of a huge, angry spider in a web, which Zlobdan explained Mergim was going to get as a tattoo; and Cormac, affixing the bandage, explained that he couldn’t get a tattoo for another three months. When Zlobdan lifted an eyebrow, Cormac said, “Tell him if he does we’ll have to take the leg off,” which was hypothetically, potentially true, even if it was profoundly unlikely. And when Zlobdan had explained to them once more that they didn’t have to pay, Mergim came out of the kitchen and handed Cormac a heavy plum cake.

And Cormac left to the man tearfully shaking his head over and over and cheering, as if Cormac had performed a miracle, and he felt both acutely ridiculous, given the tiny job he’d done, and rather pleased with himself. He heard the music start up again as he let himself back into the stinky lift, with an exhausted-looking young woman pushing a filthy double buggy and coping with a whining toddler at her side too, covered in snot, in a T-shirt too thin for the brisk spring day.

He opened the door for her on the way out.

“Can I give you a hand with the buggy?” he asked, seeing her struggle.

“Fuck off, Social Work,” she barked at him, and the day went on.

Chapter 26

It was the silence she’d noticed as she sat down the previous evening on the deep and comfortable little sleigh bed in the slope-roofed spare room, with its gray washed boards and faded blue-and-yellow rug. Well, no, it wasn’t silent, in fact; there were rustles outside; she could hear the wind, unusually, moving through the trees and the distant squawk of—what, a bird? An animal? She didn’t know.