After a while his aunt said she had to go home and do some work, so Daniel sat by his father on his own into the afternoon, watching for any sign that he might be awake.
Nursing staff came and went, wanting to know if he had seen anything, but each time they asked he shook his head.
When a nurse came to open his father’s eyes again and look into them with a penlight, Daniel asked if his father could really hear them speaking as the junior doctor had suggested earlier in their meeting.
‘I don’t know is the honest answer,’ she said. ‘But some people do think speaking helps, that patients like your father can hear, and are aware of, things going on around them. Sometimes patients have woken up here in this unit and said exactly that as they’ve slowly got better.’
Although there was no way of knowing if his father could really hear, Daniel decided he was going to keep believing he could, that talking to him would make a difference and help him weave a little magic all of his own.
So after the nurse had left he started to describe the little things at first.
The room they were in.
The nurse sitting at her central station.
What the hospital was really like because, even though it was on the outskirts of Cambridge, the city in which they had always lived, until now they hadn’t paid it much notice.
On and on, until he found the words he wanted most.
‘I didn’t mean what I said in the car.’
To prove it, Daniel told his father about the camping trip they were going to take as soon as he was better, describing how they would pitch their tent in a clearing of soft brown needles, with a stream nearby into which boulders had tumbled an age ago.
‘At night, we’ll make a fire inside a ring of stones,’ said Daniel. ‘And when the logs have burned down to red-hot bricks we’ll put tins of beans round the sides, and we’ll cook sausages and bacon in a black pan, and fry eggs. We’ll sit by the fire with the trees around us, eating and talking about whatever we want to, watching moths shine above the coals and listening to bats clicking in the dark, the cold at our backs, imagining the rest of the world has been shorn off into space.’
But his father didn’t move, as if the future meant nothing at all.
Daniel didn’t give up. He kept talking, describing things that had already happened in their lives as clearly and as truthfully as he could remember them, like the yew tree they had cut up after it had fallen on the greenhouse two years ago. About the evening they had come back from the cinema to find the back door wrenched open and the television gone, a bright rectangle left in the dust on the cabinet. Even the weekend in a cottage with his father’s friends where the four men had drunk themselves to sleep in the living room, leaving Daniel to wake them in the morning with heads sore enough to make them swear never to drink again.
‘Wake up,’ urged Daniel. ‘Please. I don’t know what’s going to happen if you don’t.’ The longer he sat beside his father, waiting for something to happen, the more the frustration built up inside him as he thought about Mason. By the time two nurses came to give his father a bed bath, Daniel had already decided what he was going to do. As he left the room, the nurses told him the ward would be in contact if anything happened and he nodded and said thank you for all their hard work and kind words before he left to find Mason and tell the man that he should leave him and his father alone.