Her brain is mysterious. Just as sometimes she knows her son, and sometimes not, some days she can hold a short conversation with me, and other times not. These don’t correlate. On days when two or three sentences have passed between us, and made sense, I have asked about her children, and got nothing back, or something like, ‘He’s a beautiful baby, as you were.’ It’s part of another conversation, not the one we’re having, and I can’t unravel it.

Then on days when all she’s managed are random words, I have mentioned John, or one of the other children, and she says, ‘He was here a while ago. Too long.’ Which makes perfect sense, and shows she has an idea of time passing.

Once she is as awake as she’s going to be, I clean her up. She eats little, but there’s still a defecation to deal with. I can tell more about her health from this than from her answers to my enquiries.

When she’s clean, I massage some oil into her skin. It’s unperfumed, and she seems to enjoy my touch. At least, she moves from time to time as if in pleasure, and sometimes a smile may pass across her face.

The skin on her body is almost white. Skin colour has great significance for modern humans, rooted in the horrors of their history. It’s not long since they counted those with darker skin as less than human, as tradeable goods. It makes no sense. Even less when you consider they used the dead bodies of people with dark skin for medical dissection, and learnt much about human anatomy from them. If they knew they were the same under the skin – to the extent that they could learn about their common humanity from what they found there – how could they then attach so much importance to what they knew to be a surface feature?

Most of the time, it seems humans don’t look any deeper than the outside of things. Which, of course, is how they are fooled by me and my kind.

But even the outer surface can tell a great deal if you look properly. As I touch Margaret’s skin, I can see the story of her life written upon it, because I have no reactions based on preconceptions, and no emotions of repulsion or attraction.

Here are stretch marks, from her childbearing. Here are scars. From their placement I can tell she has had bowel surgery, and I know from her records it was for cancer, some years ago. And a hysterectomy, marked upon her here. And here, on her shin, is a mark I think must be over 70 years old, from a blow with something hard. I surmise a sporting injury. What would mark the leg of an English girl in the 1940s? A hockey stick, perhaps.