The morning nurses had a swift and quiet handover, which was unusual, and they told Hegs he was due to go for an emergency CT scan. Ms Jo Moran arrived swiftly beside a young doctor with gimpy swagger, neon lime crocs, all business, and skidded at the edge of Hegs’s bed. Hegs was asked all sorts of questions, and looked perplexed as Ms Jo Moran was getting him to tip his nose with his left hand and right hand and left foot up, right foot up.

Michal came in all prepared with a black leather wheelchair, lifting it up on its back wheels like a BMX bike.

‘Patreeeeck, I bring you now for CT brain. Get your bed coat, come now, good man.’

Molly Zane handed Hegs’s file to Michal in a thick brown envelope, sealed, to be brought to the scan and brought straight back – the entire life and medical history of Patrick Hegarty in one flimsy and rather damp-looking cardboard file.

Hegs lifted his two legs with his hands and brought them to one side of the bed, but they didn’t move as far as he’d hoped and just when Molly and Michal thought he was about to mobilise, he threw his pale head into his two overgrown toddler palms and sobbed. Eventually, they placed a maroon Tudor bed coat over Hegs’s robust shoulders and gave him some tissues. The footrest on the wheelchair had broken off, leaving Hegs to heap one foot upon the other and Michal set off singing a U2 song in Polish.

After they left, Molly began emptying Jane’s swollen purple bag, again, and then busied herself with neatly fixing away the contents, but Jane screamed.

‘No, no, leave it so … Would you leave it be,’ Jane said, swatting at Molly, and grabbed the stuffed bag to her chest. ‘I have my secrets wrapped up in here.’

‘You do not, Jane,’ one of the young student nurses said. ‘Not all of your secrets, surely,’ and she winked at the old woman and laughed in that sad way the young play the old.

‘I certainly do, young madam, I saved it from downstairs in that awful horrid filthy place, you should really go down now and clean it up. And don’t mind your winking. Or you should perhaps read a book, and learn some manners,’ Jane said.

I stopped reading. Years ago. When I was a kid and my mind was filled with Father, I needed books. Growing into an adult, I longed for them. There was nothing safer than fiction. But then as I started out on my own, I was so busy. Books reminded me of all the shaking and screaming and suffocating and hitting. I couldn’t concentrate on other people’s stories. Fuck the Cave. And the shadows. Fuck the peach with the friends I needed, they were never coming; talking insects didn’t take me to New York, and a man didn’t show a keen interest in me taking over his chocolate factory, a teacher didn’t come and pluck me into her world of hair ribbons and shiny Mary Janes. Dickens made me feel like I was exaggerating, because there was no workhouse. Or undertakers. Dylan Thomas made a hash of it all. And when Kate Brady ended up walking all alone and destitute in London and never reconciling with the big thick fuck of a father in the third of that trilogy, this finished me.