‘Oh . . . she’s back at the hotel,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t feeling too clever.’

‘You don’t need to make things up,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Yeah, well she gets upset coming in here, that’s all.’ He looked at his feet for a few seconds, smiled when he looked up again. ‘You sleeping OK?’

I told him that I was probably sleeping too much. The drugs I was on.

‘Well, that might be a good thing,’ he said.

‘I suppose.’

He looked around and pulled a face. ‘Bloody Nora, do you ever get used to the smell in here?’

I think I’ve mentioned Fleet Ward’s distinctive aroma already, but in case I’m misremembering, just assume that it’s there all the time, and even though I didn’t bother answering my old man’s question, no, you never get used to it.

There’s that . . . bleachy hospital smell, obviously, but that’s just what’s always around, lurking underneath. On top of that, you’ve also got – in various pungent combinations, depending on the time of day and the ‘condition’ of certain patients – all manner of other special stinks.

What do wine ponces call it? Top notes . . .

Blood, shit, sick, sweat, piss, jism.

Sometimes you just catch a niff, if a niff feels like you’ve been punched in the face, and other times it’s something that lingers and you can’t shift, that you can smell on yourself in bed at night however hard you’ve scrubbed in the shower. Oh, and you smell fresh paint quite a lot, because even though bedclothes and curtains get cleaned regularly, removing any of the above from the walls is going to involve a fair bit of redecoration. There’s usually someone in here slapping emulsion around once a week, and even though too much of that can make you feel like throwing up, given the choice I’d take the smell of paint any day.

Dulux Lemon Zest, if you want to be accurate about it.

‘Oh . . .’ Dad grinned and held aloft the plastic bag he’d brought in with him. He set it down on his lap and rummaged inside, to remind himself of the things my mum had put in there so he could list them correctly. ‘There’s some of those biscuits you like . . . a bit of fruit and a few little boxes of juice.’ He leaned forward and winked. ‘And several Twixes, obviously.’ He said it like he’d smuggled in a kilo of heroin, or a cake with a file inside, even though the bag might have been checked while he was signing the visitors’ book in the airlock. The truth was that, unless you were visiting someone whose diet needed to be carefully monitored, you could bring in more or less whatever you fancied.

I’d actually gone off Twixes a bit, but I didn’t say anything.