He picked up the Independent, walked briskly to the part of the big hospital where he’d made an appointment. Simply unable to think coherently about what he was doing, he could only presume it was an act of great cowardice to come here, where the brickwork crumbled and people in plaster-casts jostled pregnant women down long corridors where the walls were painted pale, depressing green. Here you waited a week for the results; there were plenty of private clinics where you could get an answer the same day. I have waited fifty-eight years, Harry told himself, I am going to wait another week. So many young men in the second-floor waiting room. Some alone, some with friends: a pale unsmiling group sitting with notices about the Patient’s Charter on the walls above their heads. Tension everywhere in the air. He thought of Michael.

His name was called by a nurse who looked harassed. A weary-looking Indian doctor talked to him briefly, told him to roll up his sleeve. He watched the needle go in, saw his red – almost black – blood fill a small test tube, red-black blood, healthy-looking enough, but what secrets did it contain? He was told to come back in a week, the appointment was made, he turned to go and then looked back at his blood once more as it disappeared on a tray with other test tubes into a small lift in the side of the wall and the doors closed. He felt a sudden sense of panic: how could they be sure whose blood was whose, there must be hundreds of mistakes, people being given wrong information, their lives changing forever.

He caught a bus, tried to read the newspaper but could not concentrate. As the bus slowed down by the roundabout he suddenly jumped off, then walked towards the cemetery. At the big iron gates he took off his jacket and slowed his pace, but not too much, walked to the area he knew best. The Council had cut back, he presumed, on caring for this place; many of the graves were cracked and crumbling and grass grew straggly and trampled, uncut: no Corpse’s Charter, obviously. He always noticed, up towards the back of the cemetery, the same old headstone, half-broken, which nevertheless clearly said:

JOHN ANGUS TRADE

1868–1931

always remembered

‘Always remembered by me John Angus Trade,’ he said aloud. Someone of course had tried to obliterate the G.

A woman was passing with a small corgi like the Queen’s. She averted her eyes as she passed Harry, walked a little faster, she believed she had seen a madman talking to a broken gravestone.