As soon as I laid eyes on him, I felt like turning around and leaving him to their mercy. It wasn’t so much the Juno-I-knew-you-would-come, with which he greeted me, but the twinkly-eyed, knowing grin that accompanied it that infuriated me beyond reason. Nevertheless, I heard myself apologising for not coming before, for not knowing what had happened to him.

‘Do not leave me here, Juno,’ he begged me in a whisper. ‘I go mad.’

I glanced around me at the day ward, empty except for two old ladies dozing in their chairs, undisturbed by a television blaring in the corner, and an old fella nodding and chatting away to himself whilst he tried to fill in a jigsaw puzzle.

‘Is awful here,’ Nick confided. ‘All stinky old ladies. No one even play chess.’

I heard real desperation in his voice and I relented. ‘Don’t worry. If we can’t get past the guards on the gate, we’ll tunnel our way out.’ I looked around for a nurse. ‘Leave this to me.’

Three-quarters of an hour later, accompanied by a bag containing pyjamas and slippers (thoughtfully brought in by Mr Singh), a walking frame that Nick had refused to use, but which I wedged in the back of the van to save any arguments with the staff nurse, and his new medication, I assisted him into the front seat of my van.

He began to perk up as soon as the van passed through the hospital gates. I could sense him growing restless. He was excited. There was something he wanted to tell me.

‘Juno, I have great idea,’ he said at last.

‘Oh yes?’ I kept my eyes on the road.

‘We open shop.’

‘Sorry?’

‘My shop. We sort out junk – throw away old rubbish – smarten up, open it …’

I interrupted him. ‘Just a moment … you told me that you shut the shop because it was too much for you … you’re too old, you’re not well, you can’t cope with it any more. And now, when in addition to all that you’ve just had a stroke, you want to open it again?’ This wasn’t my objection at all. It was his use of the word we that had me worried.

He was nodding vigorously. ‘Yes, yes! Life too short, Juno … I not ready to be with stinky old crazies … eat baby food … walking frame. We clean shop. Make nice.’

And then he added. ‘I am not ready to be ghost.’

I ignored this last remark. ‘It’ll need more than cleaning. It’ll need redecorating inside and out … Mind you,’ I conceded, ‘if you cleaned the windows and washed down the paintwork …’ Nick was nodding enthusiastically and I realised I’d better shut up. If I wasn’t careful I was going to talk myself into agreeing to what he wanted. ‘And if you did open it, who’s going to run it?’