He was standing with his elbow on the high counter, cigarette in hand, drinking an espresso. When he wasn’t drinking, he rubbed the fibrous blotch on his chin with the thumb of the hand that held his cigarette, the smoke swirling about his face. Cai asked the girl, who looked too young to be a regular employee and was perhaps still at school and doing a summer job, for a bottle of mineral water.

‘So, you’re English,’ the man said to Cai, surprising him. ‘Do you want one?’

Cai looked at the open packet of Camels that was thrust towards him and wished that he smoked so that he’d have a reason to linger.

‘I don’t… but thanks,’ he said, sounding apologetic.

‘I studied in Newcastle for a year; do you know it?’

‘No, not well. I’m from north Wales… other side of the country.’

‘Ah… I climbed a mountain in Wales once, but I don’t remember its name… too many consonants.’

‘Welsh is like that,’ Cai quipped with a smile.

‘My name is Danilo Magistrini… my friends call me Dani.’

And the scan showed a tumour on the spine, which the surgeon said was inoperable. Of course, none of them would say how long he’d got.

Caught in Cai’s gaze, Dani finished his coffee and said, ‘Mine is from an accident when I was fourteen.’ A curl of smoke rose as he stroked the scar again. ‘I came off my brother’s motorbike.’

Cai didn’t know what to say and in the moments of his hesitation he considered the palpable strangeness of the intimacy into which their scars had seduced them.

‘I guess you haven’t made friends with yours yet, then,’ Dani ventured.

Cai wanted to say, ‘Well, fuck you Dani Magistrini,’ but he remained silent and wondered what sort of friend got you noticed in such a way that you were scorned.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you,’ Dani said, seeing something in Cai’s face that Cai hadn’t intended to give away.

‘It’s not offence I’m feeling,’ Cai said, and searched for words… but found none.

The two men looked at each other long enough for discomfort. In the moment before he turned to leave the bar, Cai wanted Dani to hold him.

Tudor didn’t want to add months to life; he just wanted quality for the life that he had left. He wasn’t religious, but he had this notion that all the advances of medicine had a lot to answer for: he wasn’t going to allow his life, his spirit, to be held hostage in a rotting body that was past its use-by date. He thought that was a kind of idolatry. But he took all the pain relief they could offer him.