The ward had a smell that wasn’t a smell, exactly. More like the absence of every other smell, scrubbed out and replaced with something that was meant to be nothing. Mum said it was the floors. I thought it was the people, the way they sat very still so as not to be noticed.

He was at the table by the window, the one with the bolted-down chairs. He’d shaved. Someone had helped him, or watched him do it, because there was a small cut on his jaw with a square of tissue stuck to it, the way Dad used to come down to breakfast.

“You look well,” Mum said, which was what she always said.

He looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at me. He asked if the car was still making that noise, and I said it was, and he nodded as if that settled something important.

We talked about the car for twenty minutes. The noise, the man at the garage who said it was nothing, the other man who said it was the gearbox. He had opinions. He had always had opinions about cars. For twenty minutes he was exactly himself, and I kept very still, the way the other people in the room kept still, so as not to frighten it off.

Then a door banged somewhere down the corridor and he flinched, and the thing I’d been holding my breath for was gone, and he was looking at the window again.