“Thank you, darling.” Sheila Walker’s voice reverts to its normal color as she picks up the sign-in clipboard from the counter and types my name into the computer. Her long fingernails make a bright green clatter on the keyboard.

“You need to go up to the second floor, Samuel Noam Valentiner,” she says emphatically, as if I didn’t know.

The intensive care unit on the second floor is for patients wrapped in silence and loneliness. That’s why they’re sent here, to the Wellington Hospital’s neurology department. The London Brain Centre—the NASA of brain departments.

Sheila Walker hands me an A4 map of the hospital, the same one I received yesterday and the day before. With energetic swishes of her red felt-tip she circles where we are now—“We’re here”—and where I have to go—“You need to go there”—and marks the shortest route between the two points—“You’d be best taking that lift over there, Samuel.”

Mrs. Walker would be well suited to working at an information desk in the tube. “Turn right for Kensington, straight ahead for hernias, and the morgue’s on your left after the vending machine.”

“Have a nice day, Mr. Valentiner,” she says.

“You too, Mrs. Walker,” I reply, but she’s no longer paying attention.

MY MOTHER came with me to the hospital on the first day. As we waited for the lift, she said, “We don’t owe your father a thing, you know. Nothing. The only reason we’re here is because—”

“I get it,” I interrupted her. “You don’t want to see him. You promised yourself you wouldn’t.”

After a second she angrily retorted, “How come you always get everything, Sam? You’re not old enough!” She gave me a map of the hospital. “I’m sorry. It’s just that your father drives me up the wall. Oh, Sam.”

She wasn’t pleased that I had secretly asked my father to the Fathers’ and Sons’ Day at Colet Court. “He won’t come anyway,” she said at the time. Her voice suffused me like a fragrance, like the scent of rosemary in the rain, sad and muted. At that precise moment I could feel how much she loved me. All at once I could breathe properly, as if I were standing on the world’s highest peak. The ball of phlegm that usually clogged my chest was gone.

Sometimes my love for my mum is so overpowering that I wish I could die so she’d finally be happy again. Then she’d be left with her husband, Steve, and my little brother, Malcolm. A normal family—just father, mother, and child, rather than father, mother, child, and me, the kid who never looks anyone in the eye, reads too much science fiction, and is a permanent reminder of a man she can’t stand.