None of this was particularly remarkable; it was the same every morning: I was turned before the day staff came to give the red, grey-centred bony points on my body time to resume their normal colouring, thus offering clear evidence that the night nurse had been active, conscientious in the pursuit of his duty, and had not been sleeping instead of keeping watch over the thirty or so men who snored, cursed, howled or simply, like myself, lay awake under his care. I heard the click of his cigarette lighter somewhere up the dormitory and, save for the sound of his sharp inspirations, all was now quiet in this the quietest hour of the night. The heavy, hot young man smoked on in ignorance of the fact that he had missed the man in the bed next to mine.

I should not normally have concerned myself with this man, a new admission, come during the night, weepy and passive as he emptied his pockets and stripped off the clothes which the night nurse dropped in a black plastic bag and carted off somewhere, I don’t know where. I believe I had been asleep, really sleeping, for a few minutes, maybe an hour or two, rare for me, when I woke to see the new man, a ghostly grey in the whispery blue of the night light, grey the same as everything in that light, blade between thumb and forefinger, pummeling at his cheek and neck with a quiet, enduring commitment, lining his stubbled skin, letting out occasional soft gasps before he weakened and laid himself to sleep, to die, the light catching as black the blood which ran down him and disappeared under the sheet.

I, of course, would be to blame for this man’s demise. Somehow I would be at fault, as surely as if I had stolen from my bed and murdered the fellow myself. Me. The stiff one, old clay-boots with his clay head and his old clay balls, a scarcely breathing hotchpotch of hair, skin and bone, who flexed not the smallest extremity, not even a toe, who lay all night like a corpse himself, who had not spoken a word in anyone’s living memory- me, I would be to blame for the nurse’s failure to rest a finger on that short blade the man had somehow secreted into the locker between his bed and mine. They might even try to say I had put it there myself.

And yet somehow I would have to accept that, perhaps, in the way all things that happen in this world melt together, are responsible for their reshaping, reincarnation as other events, other causes, yes, somehow, I might have been at fault over this man’s death. I had never seen him before, it is true, but I would accept whatever retribution was to come my way, for that way one survived, endured, lived on, for what it was worth.