I headed back toward the Miller blocks and caught up with Mia on the way. I guess home exerts a pretty strong pull in times of trouble, even if it’s the first place trouble will come looking for you.

‘Wait up!’

‘Go away!’ She sounded angry.

‘I’ve got money! Lots of it.’ I limped ahead of her, spreading the notes out in my hands.

She stopped at that, shaking her head. ‘This is crazy. Insane. That man . . . It can’t be happening.’

‘You sound like me when they told me I had cancer.’

‘People get cancer every day, Nick. This is different.’

‘I don’t get cancer every day. It’s different when it singles you out. Suddenly nothing makes sense. Just like with Demus.’

Mia sniffed and wiped at her nose. ‘I know that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’

‘It’s OK. That’s my problem. Not yours.’ I held up a hand to deflect any objections and thrust the money at her with the other. ‘Take it. I got you into this hole. This should get you out?’

Mia reached to take the cash, then stopped, her hand halfway between us. ‘Taking credit got me into this mess. And they say to never borrow from or loan to friends.’

I smiled at ‘friends’. I wanted to be her friend, perhaps more than was good for me. She made me feel like I was part of something, part of the world, not just skating around the edges, too tied up in myself to join in. ‘It’s not a loan. It’s a gift. And it’s not from a friend. It’s from Demus, and I honestly don’t know what he is yet.’

And it was true. I didn’t really know who Demus was yet. I could be angry with last week’s Nick Hayes. Just how far a person could grow apart from themselves in quarter of a century, I didn’t know. Demus was wrapped around the same bones I was, and he had his memories of being me, filtered and edited by time and experience. But did that really make him me? Did we want the same things? Did we trust each other? Why on earth did he need to record Mia’s memories anyway? That made no sense. I should have asked, but I’d been too eager to go after Mia before I lost her.

Mia took the money, glanced both ways down the street, and started to count it. It took a while. ‘This could get me out from under Sacks. I’d have to take it to him. The other guy isn’t going to take . . . seven ninety, eight hundred, eight ten.’ She put one tenner in her pocket. ‘Eight hundred.’

‘No.’ I remembered the glitter of Rust’s eyes as he backed up the corridor, blood leaking between his fingers. ‘You have to go to the police over that one. He’s going to come after your mum.’

Mia shook her head. ‘Any sign of the coppers and Sacks’d tell Rust to do what he liked. You don’t grass. Not round here. Rust won’t touch Mum. He’d be mad to.’ She shoved the wad of money into her jacket pocket.

‘Your mum knows karate, then?’ I tried to imagine anything that would scare Rust off. Actually, a drunk with a broken bottle was scarier than karate, but I didn’t think it would do the job.

‘She knows how to look after herself.’ Mia snorted. ‘But that’s not it. You don’t know how come I can just go see a guy like Sacks.’

‘I don’t.’

‘He used to be tight with my older brother. They came up through the gang together.’

‘I didn’t know you even had a—’

‘Mike. He’s in The Scrubs now.’

‘Oh . . .’ I considered asking.

‘Wormwood Scrubs.’

‘Prison?’

‘Bingo.’ She put a finger to her nose and pointed at me with the other. Demus’s gesture. ‘Five years. Drugs.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, Sacks knows my mum from when him and Mike were little. Loyalty doesn’t run very deep with a guy like Sacks, but he likes to pretend it does, so he’s not going to let a psycho like Rust cut Mum up. It would make him look bad. And he wouldn’t have leaned on me so hard over the money. I mean, he would have held it over me, but he wouldn’t have pushed that hard. Only, that message seemed to have been lost on the new guy.’

I blinked. ‘So . . . is Sacks like, proper gangland, the firm, Kray twins and all that?’ The Krays were ancient history and I had no idea what had replaced them, but I assumed something had. ‘He’s big time?’

‘He wishes.’ Mia laughed. ‘He’s on the edge of that, hoping to get a place at the table one day, but right now he just runs an area and pays his dues. If he put a foot too far out of line, there are real heavies who would come and shoot it off.’

‘Unreal.’ Somehow, Mia being two steps from the hard core of London’s organised crime seemed every bit as difficult to take on board as Demus’s visit did. I guess maybe because Demus at least promised a mathematical proof!

‘Look, I’d better go,’ Mia said.

‘Uh . . . yeah.’

‘I mean, I need to get this sorted as soon as. My head’s a mess with all this craziness . . . and I have to see Sacks.’

‘I could come. If you want me to. You shouldn’t have to do this alone.’ No part of me really wanted to go with her. I didn’t want her to go either.

‘Better you don’t. Sacks doesn’t take kindly to new faces.’ She reached out to touch my arm. ‘Thanks, though, Nick.’

She hurried off and I stood watching. One of the streetlights flickered into life as she passed underneath, glowing an uneasy amber-red. I could still feel her hand on me.

‘Watch out for that guy,’ she shouted over her shoulder as she turned the corner. ‘He could be up to anything.’

I lifted my arm to wave and dropped it, feeling stupid. Slowly I turned for home, sick in my stomach and sore in every limb. I had chemo tomorrow. Another visit to the white world of stainless steel and starch, and the super-clean lie that everything would be alright. But I’d seen the future: one possible part of it had come back to see me. Know thyself. Philosophers have been urging us to do that since the ancient Greeks. I don’t think anyone really does, though. But I thought I probably knew myself well enough to know that everything was far from alright with Demus.

I knew a few of the kids on the ward now. Eva was the only one who really talked, though. They say it’s good to share, but in the end, whatever anyone says, we face the real shit alone. We die alone and on the way we shed our attachments. It started when I told the others I had leukaemia that day over D&D. Elton’s hug had stayed with me. It spoke volumes about his warmth and goodness. But perhaps Simon’s anger had been the most honest reaction there. He lacked the emotional wherewithal to translate it into something appropriate, but all of them were angry in their own way. I’d betrayed them. Broken the promise that I would always be there; that they could depend on me. Only Mia, who hardly knew me, was free of it. For her, it was part of her image of who I was now, not some ugly and unsettling addition. And, somehow, she hadn’t run for the hills.

‘What you thinking about?’

‘Uh.’ I looked up. Eva had come across, trailing her drip on a wheeled stand. She looked like shit, like she had been starved and beaten. Her hair had started to thin at last and her eyes had sunk into her skull.

‘You’re always thinking, Nick. Doing sums, thinking. Always inside. I’d get a headache.’ She sat at the end of my bed. We were halfway down the ward now on our one-way, kill-or-cure trip. Make that kill or pause.

‘I guess I am.’ All of us have a shell, a skin between us and the world that we have to break each time we speak to it. Sometimes I wished mine were thinner. ‘How are you doing, Eva?’

‘Oh, good,’ she said, and smiled a skull’s smile. ‘Apart from always being sick and everything. But the doctors say I’m doing well and I don’t need to have that operation anymore. And I’m really glad about that. I mean really, really glad.’

I let her talk. It made her happy. I wasn’t so sure it was a good thing she wasn’t getting her operation. It sounded rather like they thought she was too far gone. But I hoped it was a good thing. I sat there and took my poison like a man. Or a scared boy. And tried not to let Eva be alone, or to be alone myself.

At visiting time Mother was first through the doors, looking tired and worried. It shocked me to see so much on her face, the severe lines that time and care had left there. I wanted to talk to her. Real things, not just lies about how I felt and shared promises about holidays we would never take when I got better. I wanted to talk to her like one person to another. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the words. Maybe one day but not that day. And I realised that just as the disease was starting to take me away from the world, I was for the first time, in a short and self-absorbed kind of life, starting to really see it for what it was. The beauty and the silliness, and how one piece fitted with the next, and how we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it.