I sat down on a bench and gazed at the surface of the canal, wondering what it must feel like to drown: was it a painful death? Was it slow? Was it bearable? Dying seemed so easy. Why did we feel this profound need to live at all costs? Why was this damned instinct, this compulsion to hang on, so powerful? It would have been easier to let go. I could have leaned so far forwards that I’d have toppled in and sunk into the water of the muddy canal. No one would have seen me if I’d gone about it properly. But I couldn’t let go, I knew. I was in purgatory, condemned to live.

I drew in the night air hungrily, with desperation, as if it were compressed oxygen from a cylinder in a hospital room.

14

16 Days

One, Two . . .

The day after Charlotte’s party, my mother questioned me non-stop, and she quickly sensed I was being evasive. I tried to make up some story or other, but I remembered that Mum knew Charlotte as well as I did, so she wouldn’t have any trouble finding out that I left the party very early. Better to head her off with some woolly explanation: I didn’t stay long because I wasn’t feeling too good, probably something I’d eaten at lunchtime, or tiredness. I went out for some air, for a stroll through the city. Yes, of course everything’s fine, Mother. She wasn’t fooled – she never is – but she left me in peace. She said that Louis’s little notebook was doing me good, was doing us all good. Maybe I could attack the next challenge; it would take my mind off things.

She was right. I had sixteen short days left and Louis was still showing no sign of waking up. The electroencephalograms remained hopelessly unchanged, still as anarchic. I had asked if it was possible that moments of wakefulness, his brain’s real activity, had been missed. I was told that, with a coma, anything was possible, but that concern was growing as time went by.

Before opening my son’s notebook, I held it close and sniffed it. It still gave off a few fleeting whiffs of Louis. At the hospital, Louis’s only scent was that of the products they used to wash him. How much longer would these remnants of my son last? Time caused smells to fade, images to blur. I needed to look at photos to stop his eyes and his smile from being erased, keep them alive, not allow them to sink into the recesses of a memory that was becoming hazy much too quickly.