‘I wanted to see if you had the stomach for adventure. I wasn’t quite sure of you, James . . . you mustn’t take that the wrong way, really you mustn’t. If I didn’t like you I wouldn’t have taken the time to check. Also, I wanted to show you something that might help you be a little braver. When I was sixteen I was stepping out with a medic from King’s College who brought me into her anatomy classes, just the way I smuggled you into that one. I used to ditch cricket on a Friday afternoon and take the train from Windsor down to London. We would slice on down into their bodies, and I would sit there, wondering who they were, what they did with their lives, whether they were happy, as we peeled back the skin on their upper arms and dissected the bicep. It’s funny, but we used to have the most amazing trysts after that. We never even made it out of the teaching hospital, we’d just take the elevator down to the furnace room and beat each other to pieces on the brick walls in the searing heat. There’s something about the concrete fact of death that accentuates pleasure. I think it’s seeing how sad you are going to look when you can’t have fun any more. Anything else?’

‘What happened to the medic?’ I asked.

‘Oh, she found out how old I really was. And now I really must say goodbye. Only deliberate lateness is fashionable.’ With that he turned and trotted off through the snow.

I went back to my room alone and climbed out on to the roof where the snow had collected in a drift by the balustrade. The cold of the metal sheeting burned my fingers. It had begun to snow again, and the white flakes drifted down out of the white sky, falling silently on the sloping roof. I sat with a cigarette unlit between my lips and thought about what Francis had shown me: a man on a slab, without the wit to stop two fraudulent strangers fingering his inmost parts. At the time, the experience was too close to me, and it was only as I pulled away from it in the days and months that followed that I made out the whole shape. By showing me the face of death, Francis had begun to cut me loose from the illusion of immortality that keeps us from doing what we want today by offering the consolation of tomorrow. At the same time, by inveigling me into what should have been a sacred space, he had given me a demonstration of how easily we could slip through the cracks in a system, if only we dared do it. I lit the cigarette and felt the nicotine rushing through my vessels to calm my nerves. By the time I crawled back into my room, my hair was matted to my head with melted flakes, and the icy water was running down my back beneath my shirt.