ward then?’ the man repeated, more challengingly.
‘How should I know?’ Jacob murmured, heading for the steps that led to the even-numbered floors.
‘What you say, mate?’
Jacob came strolling back down the stairs and headed for the opposite set. The man bellowed after him: ‘Here!’
Jacob stopped and turned very slightly, and the man half sang, half spat: ‘Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that hat?’ He grinned, expecting Jacob to grin back only he didn’t but took the hat off his head and held it out: olive-coloured corduroy with the high cleft crown and a feminine, extravagant brim.
‘Have the fucking hat,’ he said evenly. The man coughed to disguise the red in his face, and put his hands in his pockets.
Level 3 looked like a section of multi-storey car park filled with signs that said ‘Do Not Park Here’. The patients who had come out to smoke, some in wheelchairs, others toting drips, huddled together on a strip of turf-like matting. They threw their dog-ends into flesh-coloured plastic barrels planted with dwarf conifers. The man in the floppy hat and coat hurried past. He jumped to peer through the dark glass façade, which was designed to be looked through the other way. At one point he even went up to the glass and pressed his hand against it. Eventually he stopped by the smokers, who indicated that the doors were right there, just behind them. He would have to go in now.
Jacob walked past the hospital map and along a corridor until he reached a lift. He walked back to the map and ran his eye down the list as far as ‘N’: Nye Bevan Ward. The name was in pink and so when Jacob set off again, he followed the line of pink tape on the linoleum floor only then he was following the blue, or the green. Where had the pink line gone?
‘There you are!’ Sally found him by the emergency staircase. He had got as far as the right floor and had not been able to go further. ‘You must have got lost. She’s through here.’
Jacob’s sister led him along a row of blue-curtained cubicles, so tightly packed that they billowed inwards under the pressure of neighbouring furniture and visitors. He sidled along the edge of the bed and squeezed himself into a chair just as a toddler visiting her grandmother rolled under the curtain’s hem. He edged the child back with his foot and leant over to kiss his mother.
‘Hullo there.’
‘Hello, love.’ She tried to raise a hand to greet her son.
‘You sound completely pissed. So you still know who I am, then?’
Monica smiled. The left corner of her mouth had been yanked down, making that side of her face sadder and younger.
Jacob ran a finger across her cheek as if testing a surface. ‘A half smile! You know how they say in novels “She half smiled”? I’ve never known what that meant before and here it is – a half smile.’
‘If I could lift this arm, my boy, I’d give you a clout.’
Jacob took her hand and stroked it.
She could see how tightly wound his mouth was and knew what that meant. ‘Don’t worry. Not much damage done. Good thing I was staying with Sally when it happened. They say London hospitals are the best.’
Sally leant in from the foot of the bed and patted her mother’s leg: ‘You’re to stay put. If we let you out, you’d only frighten the horses.’ She was speaking too loudly, Jacob too much. They would have liked a little distance from which to observe what had happened to their mother and she, too, would have appreciated more space than the cubicle allowed. Jacob and Sally veered and loomed in front of her as parents must appear to a newborn.
Jacob found a tissue and dabbed Monica’s lips. ‘You’re drooling. Must be the smell of that hospital dinner. Now let’s run a few checks!’ Jacob was going to be bluff and cajoling because this is what would make his mother feel comfortable. He could adapt perfectly when he chose.
‘Who’s Prime Minister?’
‘That bloody woman. She is a woman, isn’t she?’
‘Clement Atlee! Absolutely right. And who’s on the throne?’
‘That other bloody woman.’
‘Boudicca! Nothing wrong with you at all! And the year?’
‘Just another bloody year …’
Half an hour later, Jacob and Sally fled. When the lift doors closed, Sally asked, ‘Did you understand anything she said?’
Jacob shrugged. ‘Not a word, poor old cow. Still, at least something’s finally rid her of that dreadful west-country burr.’
Sally screeched, delighted. She did not notice that her brother was shaking.
Jacob walked down to the river and east along the difficult north bank, where he was forced into detours among churches, coffee houses and money houses on streets that jack-knifed or divided, or brought you into alleyways and newly inserted corners, as if to compel you to keep up some kind of attention and pace. He walked tirelessly and lightly, and believed that he could keep moving forever and leave no trace. He hated his mother. When his father died, fifteen-year-old Jacob had caught her looking at him in church in a way he could only describe as triumphant. He hated his father, too, for forcing her to be so small and for, in the end and despite everything, belonging to his wife and not to his son.
It was raining hard. Jacob walked on with his coat open and his hat in his hand. His hair grew wet and his face cold and still he walked, wanting to find the dark that ought to come. Further east he reached a certain street where he stopped and waited. Two hours later, Barbara came downstairs and found him. She ran him a bath, took off his wet clothes and left him.
‘You can stay if you like,’ she said when he re-emerged wearing things he had found in cupboards neither he nor Barbara had emptied. ‘In the study, though, not –’
‘Thank you.’
Jacob offered to make soup. He found potatoes and kale, chopped them roughly and cooked them briefly with a lot of garlic and chilli. He made Barbara watch him cook and told her when to sit at table. He watched her eat and jumped up to fetch whatever she might need – a napkin, a glass of wine, a tissue for her streaming eyes. She praised him energetically and he cleared everything away, and although Barbara knew that nothing would be properly clean or in its right place, she let him.
That night, they were gentle.
‘Will she be alright?’ Jacob asked.
Barbara had spoken to Sally, made some calls and done some research. ‘Not entirely, but within a month or so she ought to be able to go home, providing there’s some local care.’
Jacob had nothing left to do, so he sat down.
‘You must be exhausted,’ Barbara said. ‘What a shock.’
He shrugged, stretched and closed his eyes. ‘She’s a tough old boot.’
‘Yes.’
‘And she gave up on me years ago.’
‘When
