If this was meant as an invitation, Sebastian didn’t take it. He wanted to get away from the old man and his messed-up face, repelled by his suggestion that they were in this thing together. Congenitally sceptical, Sebastian hated – no, he abhorred – being forced into the role of a wide-eyed miracle seeker. Everything inside him bucked against starting a quest (onerous, all-consuming, time-sucking, never-ending) for some new and transformative alchemy.

He was saved from the conversation when his name was called, and he went in to meet Dr Seymour, a slightly built American in a button-down shirt and a bad tie. An expensive bicycle leaned against his office wall under a row of certificates.

He proved to be chatty, even slightly manic, but his opening line was encouraging. ‘The young are the most deserving,’ he said. ‘Well, they have the most to gain or lose.’ Scrolling through the scan cross-sections on a screen in front of him, he kept up a commentary that required little of his patient. ‘Do you have any symptoms? No? So you were just going along, shoulders back, and then this tripped you up. A splodge on a scan. It’s a weird thing, isn’t it, technology. Just surreal. You wouldn’t otherwise have had any idea.’

Dr Seymour kept scrolling and scrolling. ‘You’re being very cool about it, cooler than I would be. It’s very courageous of you.’

Courageous. Sebastian stiffened, not liking where this was going.

‘Look, I won’t say it’s inoperable. It’s eminently operable; it’s just a question of what that will achieve. You see, this is now recurrent cancer. Here and here, you see.’ He pointed. To the left of the small black mark that represented the piece of shrapnel, Sebastian saw the offending splodge. ‘In the spinal cord. Which means you’re resistant to the drugs you took last time, and unless we can find something to stop the spread of microscopic disease, we are kidding ourselves. If you were seventy-one instead of thirty-one, we wouldn’t even be talking about doing anything about it. We’d be saying the horse has bolted.’

‘Right,’ said Sebastian, reeling in his seat.

‘I have to take this to our panel,’ Dr Seymour said. ‘If I had my way, I’d operate. I mean, otherwise it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn’t it. I had one patient, we decided we couldn’t go in, I always think that we failed him…’ Here the surgeon began to ramble, and his gaze moved restlessly about the room, unable to settle, as he described how the patient died ‘a horrible, painful death’ as a quadriplegic.