Dr Atulewa returned, pushing a cart that held the tubes and needles for the IV. Anouk shifted her gaze towards him, didn’t say hello. Her eyes followed his movements as he reached over her head and switched on a fluorescent wall lamp that spluttered and revved and cast them all in its mean, blue light.

‘Would you mind if I sat?’ he asked her.

She shrugged.

He pushed the cart out of the way and sat on the edge of the bed, facing her. ‘You’re cross with me,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame you. You were sleeping well. But I’ve asked my colleagues who run the ward if I can do this procedure for you. Really, it’s their job. I had to bargain with them a little.’

‘Nurses are better at needles.’

‘You’re remembering the last time,’ he said.

Anouk nodded. Nora remembered too, the student doctor who’d run the intravenous line into Anouk’s arm and immediately Anouk saying it felt wrong, and the doctor assuring them all it was fine. Within hours, Anouk’s arm was swollen and burning.

‘My colleagues reminded me of that too,’ he said, smiling. ‘I told you, I had to bargain.’

‘Why do you want to do it?’

‘Ah,’ he said, gesturing to her arm, ‘may I?’

Anouk offered her arm and he turned it gently to expose the smooth, white underbelly. He cradled her elbow with one hand and traced the lines of her veins with his finger. ‘You have perfect veins, do you see? Very easy to work with. Some people’s veins burrow, deep down, and they wriggle out of sight. Like earthworms. They don’t want to be found. Yours aren’t like that at all.’ He let go of her arm and she tucked it close to her body, under the blanket. ‘Now. If you don’t mind, we’ll go ahead and be done with this business very quickly and you can go back to sleep. The anticipation of the thing is always far worse than the thing itself.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘It means we waste too much time worrying about the future,’ said Red.

‘Quite right,’ said Dr Atulewa, pinching a couple of blue gloves from a box mounted on the wall, snapping them on. ‘Now, Anouk. Shall we?’

She dragged her arm once more from under the blanket, as if it were some heavy load not part of her, and offered it. Dr Atulewa tied a tourniquet a few inches above the elbow, then with his fingers felt up and down the smooth path between her wrist and elbow and settled on a spot halfway between the two. He rubbed the area clean with an antiseptic cotton pad. Nora shuffled her chair closer to the head of the bed, and the sound it made as it scraped the floor was brash and unsettling.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered. She leaned close to Anouk and gave her a quick smile, and Anouk closed her eyes.

Red got up and stood at the end of the bed.