Jamie sat beside Paul’s bed and stared at his friend’s motionless face. Behind him he could hear the bip bip bip of the heart monitor. He had seen enough films and television dramas to know that if the line on the screen were to run flat – to flatline – he should shout for a doctor, and then panic would render him frantic and helpless as doctors and nurses would come running, their footfall heavy in the long corridors. They would bring out the defibrillator and Jamie would stand there and watch as they fired electricity into Paul’s chest, making his body buck, rising up and falling back onto the bed, the bed where he had lain since the accident, six weeks ago.

But nothing like that did happen.

Six weeks, and nothing had happened at all. Paul did nothing except lie motionless beneath NHS sheets, his eyes closed, his body continuing to function at the most fundamental of levels (his heart beating on, his chest continuing to rise and fall, his hair and fingernails growing, skin being shed) but his mind locked away in that body, doing nothing. Nothing but dreaming. If he did dream at all.

Paul was never alone. His family and friends took it in turn to sit beside his bed: his parents, his sister, his grandmother, Heather, Kirsty, Jamie. Most of them would sit and talk to him, chatting about life as it went on outside the hospital, pleading with him to wake up, expressing regret for things said or unsaid in the past. Sometimes Paul’s parents played recordings of his favourite football matches. Paul and his dad were both Arsenal fans – it was pretty much the only thing they had ever talked about – and Mr Garner would record matches off Radio 5 and play them back to his son, hoping a dramatic moment might reach into Paul’s sleeping brain and draw him back to the surface.

That’s what it seemed like to Jamie: that his friend had slipped deep beneath the surface of the world, into a deep lake of dreams or darkness, and although he was still there – still with them – he couldn’t communicate with them. He was too deep. He had been swallowed up, and all they could do was wait and see if the subterranean place in which he now dwelt would spit him back out. Or if he might float upwards, blinking with sleep-clogged eyes as he emerged into the light.

It was what he prayed for.