I breathe in and look around. All sorts of people. It’s like someone’s staged it for a leaflet, as an advert for diversity. A black man with a Rasta hat, a woman in a sari, a hard-looking bloke wearing overalls, the token male nurse. It’s like heaven. Good people who come out on a cold afternoon to be stuck with a needle and ask nothing in return.

Concentrate on the words and don’t chew the pen. You don’t know where it’s been. I can do this. I can. I want to be here. At this moment there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. And Ewan’s face when I tell him, when I get back to the flat later. He won’t believe me. I’ll show him the mark on my arm as proof. Shake the pen and scribble on a scrap of paper to check that it’s working. It’ll almost be worth it just for that.

3:10 pm

This is not a hospital.

Think, May, think.

Not a hospital, not a holiday, not a hotel, not a school, not home. This is nowhere.              These people aren’t

helpful

they don’t want me opening the doors –

No, thank you. I don’t need any help from you. I don’t want to listen to this music.

They say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea –

but he’s not here now

and these people are not my people.

1 April 2006

Karen

It takes me a while to spot her. The TV is blaring and they all sit in mis-matched armchairs and stare and rock and look, some of them, like they’re going to dissolve. She’s half asleep. Peaceful, almost. But thinner than last week. Her collarbones stick out too much. Her blouse is starting to hang loose across the chest.

I pull up a chair and sit opposite her, knee to knee. She sees me eventually. Her eyes flutter. She smiles. Like when Alex was little and he’d wake up from a nap with a face full of love.

‘Finally,’ she says, sitting up a little, ‘have they sent you with my medicine?’

It must be the uniform or the way I’ve got my hair scraped back. ‘No. It’s me Mum, it’s Karen.’

She narrows her eyes and looks away, out of the window at the plastic pots full of mini daffodils all starting to go brown and crispy at the edges.

‘You never come to see me,’ she says, ‘and your lips are too bright.’

‘I was here last week.’

‘And they put sugar on the vegetables.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Sugar,’ she whispers, leaning forward, ‘on the vegetables. Like they’re trying to fatten me up.’

‘Well, you could do with putting on some weight. I might have a word.’