Nothing to worry about, my father told me when I picked up, he’d been in a bad spot before he’d landed in the hospital but they’d knocked him out for much of the last few days and while he was feeling weak he was also feeling much, much better, and he was sleeping great. He told me about the nurses, explaining how they continually checked up on him and asked him how he was feeling, like I didn’t know what a nurse was. They were a marvel to him, this little rotating cohort of people who, from his perspective, behaved as if collectively possessed by some special affection for him. It didn’t seem to matter to him that it was their job, that he was their patient and that he could be anybody. He loved the attention. He loved to complain about it.

‘Here in my room every five minutes trying to get me to walk the hall on the walker but they won’t listen when I say I don’t have the strength for it,’ he said.

‘They want you up and about, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Are you eating?’

‘What? Ah, no, I can’t hold anything down, with the stomach pains on me. The diarrhoea, that’s what I can’t take,’ he said, his voice brightening as he settled into one of his favourite topics, the ongoing degradation of his bowels. ‘I don’t mind the constipation. You take a pill and that gets sorted. It’s the other stuff, this watery black scutter exploding down your leg if you don’t make it to the toilet in two seconds. Which I can’t, on account of the weakness in my legs. But the toilet is so far from the bed. It’s their own fault then, isn’t it, that them young ones have to come in and wipe my arse for me.’

‘That’s what they signed up for.’

‘I’ve a thing now in a few days, a scan, ­a – whatyoucallit. What they think is there could be a blockage of some type, in my guts. That’s what it feels like, this awful ­locked-­up feeling in my guts.’

‘They’re the experts, but I reckon whatever’s going on with your bowels has to do with the drink.’

‘We’ll see,’ was all he said to that.

I asked him how things were in Edmonton, had the city been shut down like Toronto?

‘Ah, I don’t have a clue what’s going on with all that. I don’t go anywhere or see anyone anyway. This whole thing hasn’t made a blind bit of difference to me.’