Wincing, limping, he keeps on walking. Where is the border? He has no idea. He knows where is east, because the sun is rising, red sky leaking through the gaps in the leaves. Once red sky did not make him think of blood. Once he was a child like any other. He must keep heading east, but where is he going? If you lose your past, can you ever go back? How can he ever explain to his father: his mother? (Once his mother used to hold him close. She loved to talk to him in funny voices. He cannot bear to remember his mother.) He has become a shame to them, a curse, worse than nothing. And yet, he gets up, and he forces his feet to accept the cruel yoke of his ill-fitting boots, and he ignores the hunger, and the sores on his back, which he has not been able to resist scratching, and his eye, which is infected, and half-closed. Through crooked lids, he sees leaves, sunlight, as the sun strains up above the horizon. He is sick of leaves. He is sick of sunlight. He is sick of it all. But somehow he keeps going.
Davey Lucas sits with Justin in the waiting area at the big North London hospital, which is undergoing modernisation, which has been undergoing it for over a decade. The waiting area and foyer are splendid, but the wards and corridors are crowded and narrow. The local paper says infection rates are high: MRSA, Clostridium difficile. Old people go in and never come out. But it’s still a hospital, with modern medicine, and highly trained doctors hurrying about. The two men sitting here have to be hopeful.
They’re not talking much: there’s not much to say; but they’re thinking, hard, in their own separate worlds. Davey Lucas is ashamed of the direction of his thoughts, and keeps trying to swing them back to kindness, but he’s swept by tides of anxious self-interest: ‘If poor little Abdy has meningitis, will Dubois get it, and Harry? Will I? Please don’t let my children catch it. What about the new car? Is that infected?’
He looks across at Justin, and pats him on the arm. ‘All right, old son?’ he asks.
‘Yeah,’ says Justin. ‘Thanks, mate. It’s just, you know, the waiting.’ But really Justin’s thinking, ‘It’s all my fault. Why didn’t I take Abdy to the doctor earlier?’ But perhaps it is Zakira’s fault, as well. Why was she so sure the rash was eczema?
Now Davey is wishing he could wash the hand that just patted Justin on the arm. ‘I know he’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘Just fine. But I’ll have to get home to the kids, in a bit. My mother’s gone round to baby-sit, and Delorice doesn’t really trust her with them.’
Home to the kids. Justin’s swept with envy. Those three words sound like heaven to him. But he has to relax. It will be all right. ‘Can’t see your mum as a baby-sitter. Amazing woman,’ he responds, vaguely. He has met Lottie Lucas: an art collector, still blonde and beautiful in her sixties. But rather self-centred. Not exactly motherly ... Why is the doctor taking so long?
‘Women,’ says Davey, ‘They’re not what they were,’ and the two men smile at each other, wryly, but at the same time, some part of them means it. What happened to comfortable, stay-at-home mothers? Why is it them at the hospital?
A white-coated doctor appears in the doorway.