We laughed and then the light came on in Scott’s toilet. He cried, “Oh shit, my dad!” and hung up. I was left sitting there in the dark at my desk.

If he squeezes your hand, he’s still there. I had to find out if my father was still there.

When my mother had finished making love with her husband, she went into Malcolm’s room, as always, to say good night. When she didn’t find him there, she knocked on my door, carried my sleepy brother to his own bed, and then came back to see me.

“I’m not going to sign that indefinite visitor’s permit for you, Sam. I don’t want you going to the hospital all the time. You need to focus on your exams, you know? That’s the most important thing right now. If you want to go and see him again in a few weeks’ time, fine—we can talk about it.”

My mother pays almost nineteen thousand pounds per year for me to attend Colet Court School, so it’s my fault that she doesn’t have enough money and is unhappy. But my mind was entirely on the scoobie, so I just said, “Okay.”

“Your father never took care of you, so there’s no reason you should look after him now. That may sound harsh, Sam, but it’s for your own good, do you hear? Otherwise, you’ll just end up being even more disappointed.”

Again I said, “Okay.” What else could I say? At last I knew where my father was. In C7. And I knew he was wearing my scoobie. She was wrong about him. Or was I? In any case I knew I would go back there to squeeze his hand. For as long as it took until, one day, he returned that squeeze.

But I kept those thoughts to myself—the first time I’d ever hidden something really important from my mother. By no means the last, though.

ON THE SECOND day Scott brought a great stack of print-outs about brain injuries to school for me.

“Virtually everyone shows signs of delirium when they wake up from an induced coma,” he told me during the lunch break, which we spent on St. Paul’s School’s carefully tended hockey pitches behind the assembly hall instead of at the dining hall. Once we’d passed our exam with top grades, we too would become so-called Paulines. Everyone at St. Paul’s went on to have a brilliant career—at least that’s what the mothers of Paulines said—and they all knew by the age of sixteen what they were going to study and do with the rest of their lives.

Nothing could interest me less at the moment.

“Delirium—what a scary thought! Hallucinations and nightmares. You no longer know who you are or who anybody else is. Your dad might think you’re an orc or a synes-creep.”