‘Jesus, Case. Do we have any idea at all where she came from?’

Case looked amused.

‘No,’ he said. ‘One other thing: sometimes there’s a convulsion. She dribbles – we can’t collect any of it, whatever it is – and there’s a lot of shifting and partial fading. Just for a moment she looks like a much older woman. Nothing’s finished here.’

19 Anyone Can Make a Mistake

NINETEEN

Anyone Can Make a Mistake

‘Look at all these women,’ Anna Waterman said.

Nine in the morning, and the radiography reception area at St Narcissus, Farringdon was full of them, their anxiety expressed as a tendency to text. Their thumbs brushed the keys of their phones at ferocious speeds; they weren’t going to look up, in case that meant admitting something about their predicament. The reception area helped. It was less a waiting room than a stylised version of one – a quiet postmodern whimsy about lines of chairs against a wall – featuring upholstery in calm warm shades of blue-grey, uplighters like white porcelain cups, clean little round tables piled with the terrestrial editions of property and gossip magazines which no one read any more. Framed on the walls were silhouettes of a cat, which, when you looked at them in a certain way, proved to resemble 2-dimensional slices through the animal, a joke cooked up between the radiologists and St Narcissus’ artist-in-residence. But underneath the joke everything it referred to remained, and when you looked up there was a stain on the ceiling tiles, shaped, according to your mood, either like the map of a distant island or a section through someone’s tumour.

‘That,’ said Anna, who hated hospitals, ‘is the giveaway.’

Marnie laughed.

‘I quite like the uplighters,’ she said, then: ‘Mum, I’ve just got to send a text.’

‘No one can like uplighters, surely?’

‘Mum—’

The receptionist interrupted them. ‘It’s an IUV appointment, isn’t it?’ he shouted at Anna.

‘Excuse me?’ Anna said. ‘I’m not the patient.’

‘You’ve had your kidneys done, dear, haven’t you? Last week? Now look, why don’t you just read this leaflet for me while you wait?’

‘Why? Can’t you read it yourself?’ She glanced at the leaflet, made out the words, ‘Please attend promptly at the Radiology reception desk,’ and repeated with ominous clarity, leaving plenty of space between the words: ‘I’m not the patient.’

During the exchange that followed, Marnie’s scan was called. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promised. ‘Why not sit there, where you can watch the TV?’

‘Don’t you start.’