But chips are no use now because my stomach isn’t there, there’s no place for them dripping fat and vinegar. If I retch I’ll split apart and that’ll be it, if I cough and swallow it’ll never stop and the knives will come early, right now they’re only pins hovering, ready to stick me if I move, but soon they’ll get bigger and sharpen and –

May –

I think I’ve said it out loud but I can’t be sure. My eyes, my eyelashes stuck together, I can open them a bit and when I do it’s not the light like I expected but the dull grey of early evening – the curtains already closed, and the bowl next to the bed that I don’t want to see and the smell of – and there’s no one here. For a moment I think I can hear my mother downstairs humming the ‘1812 Overture’ with Dad banging his fists on the table in place of all the cannons. That can’t be right. If she’d only come I could make her laugh, I could make my voice work long enough to sing. I’d growl at her Daylight come and we wan go home and say do me a favour – open the curtains will you love, and get me something to drink. Anything but water. There are steps on the stairs now and it’s her. Who else would it be? She’ll be here and after the drink there’ll be some kind of pill to take and I’ll need to have a piss and to distract myself from it I’ll say Did you know they’ve stopped selling medicine in Boots? And she’ll say The old ones are the best eh, Arthur? And she’ll help me sit up a little, just a little so that it prickles but doesn’t cut, doesn’t burn me in half like a laser in a James Bond film when they still had a bit of class about them. And I’ll say It’s because the cough mixture was always leaking out through the lace holes. It won’t matter if she laughs or not. She’ll sit with me as it goes dark and I’ll feel her hands on me and as long as she’s there I’ll know that none of it – not one bit of it was imagined.

4:25 pm

Some parts of things are

lost. Some parts of things are hard to put your finger on. But not the boy.

He’s here.

He takes my hand.

Here is the church, here is the steeple. The boy

here, holding my hands.                    Not a boy. Not a man. His hair is like fire.          Here is the church, here is the steeple doing something with my fingers. Maybe he can mend them so many.

so clever!

I used to know things.