‘I mean . . . this is last week.’

‘Hah!’ John’s one annoying habit was that he spoke his laughs. He didn’t laugh like a normal person . . . he said ‘hah’. It made me less willing to trust him. Laughter should be unguarded even if nothing else is. ‘You’re pulling a Back to the Future on us!’

‘N-no.’ Simon always stuttered when building up to a joke. ‘H-he’s the Terminator.’

‘Sent from the future to kill us!’ Elton grinned. He did the Schwarzenegger voice. ‘Give me your clothes!’ A wider grin as he brushed imaginary dust off his shoulder. ‘Dream on, boy. You can’t touch this. It’s called style.’

‘I was in an oncology ward . . .’

‘Onk-what-ogy?’ John snorted.

‘Ward?’ Simon frowned. ‘Like a hospital?’

‘Cancer.’ A scowl from Elton. ‘Not cool, dude. That shit’s not funny.’

‘I’ll prove it! I’ll . . .’ The dice fell from my hand and I sat down. I grabbed a pen, and while the others leaned over to add up the numbers I’d rolled, I pushed aside the edge of the gaming mat and began to write, pressing hard enough to score the polished wood.

‘That’s you done, Nicky.’

‘What?’ I blinked. The pretty nurse, Lisa, was reaching for my arm. I snatched it away.

‘Easy.’ She smiled. ‘You’re done. The needle can come out now.’ She started to unwind the gauze below my elbow. Above her head, the chemo bag, once pregnant with venom like the sacs behind a snake’s fangs, hung flaccid, drained of all but a few yellow drops. ‘Where did you wander off to then?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Away with the pixies, you were. Gazing up there somewhere.’ She unwound the last turn and took hold of the needle, ready with a square of cotton wool for any bleeding.

‘Last week. I was last week.’ I stiffened as the needle came out. It stung rather than hurt, but the sensation was unpleasant. ‘Does this stuff give you nightmares?’

Lisa pursed her lips and straightened up. ‘A lot of children get bad dreams in hospital. Don’t worry about it. We’ll be checking on you through the night to make sure you’re not having a bad reaction. You can press the call button if you feel sick. There are medicines we can give you.’

‘Medicines for the medicine.’ I blinked. Part of me hadn’t quite left Simon’s room yet. I could still feel the impression of the pen on my fingers. I looked down, expecting to find them inky, but they were clean. ‘I mean, can you get hallucinations and stuff?’

Lisa shook her head. She had her hair tied up. ‘Don’t you worry about any of that, Nicky. You’ll be fine.’

She walked away with the bundled gauze and needle on her tray. I watched her go.

A modest increase in the windowless ward’s general brightness and clatter signalled the arrival of morning, along with a dawn chorus of greetings at the nurses’ station as the night shift swapped with the day shift. I rolled over, bleary-eyed and tangled in my sheets. I felt sore, as if I really had spent the night running from myself down endless corridors, rather than just having had a rather unimaginative dream.

I’d slept badly. The pain in my joints, the agony that lanced without warning along the bones of my arms and legs, had kept lifting me from the shallow pit of my dreams. When the aching had first started, Mother had said they were growing pains and that most boys got them if they decided to gain a foot in height in a year. The growing pains kept growing, though. They were the symptoms that had taken me to the local doctor’s office to be dismissed and then marched back again three weeks later behind my indignant mother. At that point they had humoured us with an appointment at the hospital for ‘tests’.

After that first long chemo night my mother arrived promptly at nine, for visiting hours. The parents flowed in and she entered midstream. Where curiosity had other mothers and fathers rubbernecking all the way down the ward, Mother kept her gaze pinned to me, refusing to look at the other children.

‘How are you feeling, dear?’

‘I . . . I don’t know.’ I saw her face tense. ‘Fine!’ I said. Her eyebrows arched. ‘Not too bad.’ I settled for something close to the truth. ‘Strange.’

‘They said to expect nausea at some point.’ Her eyes flickered to the sick bowl on my table. ‘And the hair loss, of course.’ She looked up at my fringe as if expecting to see it thinning. As if the unruly mop that had been riding about on my head for fifteen years might just have been waiting all this time for an excuse to leave and would slide off at the first opportunity.

‘Who was that man you were talking to in the corridor last night?’

‘What man?’ She looked guilty at once. I’d never seen her look guilty before. Except maybe when she told me the train had killed my father instantly. I read in the local newspaper that he had been struck a glancing blow and died in hospital that night. That always bothered me. He’d chosen to end it quickly and failed, even with the help of a train. As if when the universe gave him his cancer it was determined that he suffer, one way or the other.

‘The tall guy, bald.’ I touched my hair. ‘And why were you here so late?’

‘I forgot something. Had to come back.’ She waved down the nurse passing the end of my bed. ‘Is Nicholas going to be allowed home today?’

‘The doctors have been through, looked at the notes. Everything’s fine.’ A smile full of professional optimism. ‘You can take Nicholas home whenever he feels ready. We’ll be sending you confirmation of his next appointment, same time next week – another overnight stay, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, that’s excellent.’ Mother echoed the woman’s smile and turned to me. ‘Ready to go?’

And that was that. Five minutes later I was walking out of there into the big wide world as if nothing had happened and my veins weren’t full of toxin and I hadn’t left behind half a dozen dying children who looked like those bodies in the concentration camp footage they showed us in history class. Eva had to stay. At least until she could keep fluids down, they said. I stopped at the end of her bed to say goodbye. She looked sick, but she was back to voicing every thought that ran through her head, even with her parents on either side.

‘Uh. See you next week, I guess.’ I felt I should do something. Maybe reach out and pat her foot where it tented the sheet close by. But I didn’t. Not with her mother and father looking at me, accusation in their eyes. Why aren’t you sick, too?

Eva managed a smile. ‘I’ll see you next week. I hadn’t thought of that. We’ll be seeing each other every time now. We’re . . . what’s the word? Syncrotised? This is my mum and dad. See you, Nick! See you!’ She kept talking as I followed Mother out, as if the conversation were a rope and if she only kept it unbroken I would be held by it, unable to leave.

It’s always a shock, when you’ve been hit by some calamity, to see the world go about its business with perfect indifference. When Elvis dies, when Charles marries Diana, you feel you’re part of things, that everyone is moved by the same current, even if they really don’t want to be. But turn that around and you discover that your father dying or your blood turning against you doesn’t make the slightest impact. Not only does the world keep turning and the birds keep singing, but the buses run, people scurry to work bound about with their own cares, and the man in the corner shop still snarls at you as if taking your money is a great imposition.

We drove home through the Friday pre-lunch traffic. There’s no good time to drive in London, just less-worse times. The others would be at school. Second day back. The others. As if I were still part of them, not a modern-day leper with a soon-to-be-shiny scalp and a drip stand in place of sores and a bell that tolls ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ It doesn’t matter what the doctors say, there’s no fatal disease that doesn’t feel contagious to the person sitting next to you.

John and Simon went to the same school as me, Maylert, a private school nestled up against the banks of the Thames. You didn’t have to be rich to go there, just not poor. Some were rich, though. John’s grandfather had been a lord! His father did something in the city. Shovelling money into buckets by the look of the Richmond mansion they lived in. Simon’s parents weren’t rich, a teacher and a university lecturer, but they stumped up the fees so that Simon would get beaten less viciously and by a better class of bully. Simon had ‘victim’ written all over him: overweight, obsessive, and blessed with a set of social graces that made me look suave.