“Go and have a drink on the Plaza de España. And in the Carrer de Tarragona, I remember there’s a bar my father took me to when he first went back there, after Franco’s death. And the Horta garden…”

The old man’s wild eyes are staring at the wall, he gets lost in the Parc del Laberint d’Horta, sees his father’s face at the same age as he is now, just before his death, and that of Franco being eaten by stone lions.

“Yes, Grandad.”

“Wait, I forgot what it’s called. I’ll remember it in a second – a bar where they do the most amazing tapas.”

Jo is tired. She can’t understand why Saïd isn’t contacting her. OK, so he’s gone, but why didn’t he say anything to her? She’s full of questions that lead her nowhere.

“Do you want to take a stroll somewhere else? I can push your wheelchair down the corridors. Or go downstairs.”

The hospital garden is not very large, but it does have a couple of leafy hedges and enough greenery to make you believe in rebirth, in spring and that kind of crap. And then there are a few birds. She’d rather that than this room where she knows every corner, the corridors with the beige linoleum, the plastic plants – or sometimes real ones, donated by a family, after a patient dies.

“No, I’m tired, and besides, it’s teatime soon.”

Jo swallows; she finds it hard. Her grandfather gives off a stale, rancid smell, a smell of old fridge and cologne gone off. She tries to imagine what she’d be thinking if she had only a few months left to live – all she can find is fear, and naive, desperate begging.

Johanna has never been anywhere. Not even on school trips, because her parents wouldn’t pay. She thinks about Spain, about couples dancing the Argentine tango on La Rambla, welded by the rhythm. Her grandfather is giving her something tangible, the name of a station, the destination of a possible escape, someday, eventually – an invaluable gift. The old man doesn’t know it. He’s fidgeting in his wheelchair, impatient to munch on his Petit Lu cookies softened in stewed fruit. Spoon-fed by Chloé or perhaps Justine, the pretty blonde with her hair cut low across her forehead who speaks a little loudly. And who laughs at his jokes when he has the courage to tell some. He knows them all by their first names. And yet usually there’s not much time to get acquainted in palliative care. He’s been here a long time.

“How’s your father?”

“Hasn’t he been to see you these past few days?”

“Yes.”

“And?”