An uncomfortably attractive nurse, who didn’t look much older than me and called me Nicky in an annoyingly patronising voice, set up my line. The ‘line’ was a needle stuck into a vein in my arm, bound with about a mile of white gauze. The poison oozed through the needle, fed down a plastic tube from a clear bag on a stand beside the bed. It was a virulent yellow. I imagined radioactive urine might look much the same.

The parents and other visitors were shuffled out at half past five, some striding sharply toward the doors as if eager for fresh air, others dragging their heels, calling goodbyes. Some brave-faced, waiting to cry, some as grey and drawn as the child they were leaving behind. They went in a swirl of noise and empty promises, Mother with them. I didn’t feel any more alone than I had done previously. It had only been a day, but I’d already discovered that cancer drops a bell jar over you, cutting you off from the world. You can still see it, but what it says is muffled and can’t touch you. I hadn’t called anyone. I hadn’t told anyone. What would I say?

Nobody on the ward wanted to talk much, except for a girl called Eva in the bed opposite. She wanted to talk too much. The rest of us seemed to want to pretend this wasn’t happening. To read our books and our comics, eat our sweets if we still had appetites, listen to the hospital radio on headphones that looked like white plastic tongs.

‘They say some people don’t vomit at all in the first week,’ Eva told me.

I’d tried keeping my eyes glued to the pages of my book. I’d brought Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica because I wanted to see him build his marvellous mathematical house of cards. I needed to see the edifice raised in all its glory. Fresh, entire, complete, like a perfect son sprung whole from his father’s brow. Then I would move on to read how a brilliant young mathematician named Kurt G?del had brought Russell’s great work crashing down eighteen years later. The genius’s golden child shown to have feet of clay after all; tripped by G?del’s theorem of incompleteness and left in sprawling ruin. I guess G?del’s theorem was Russell’s cancer, the uncontrolled division of abnormal cells deep within the mathematics, a taint that no amount of poison could drive from its veins.

Eva didn’t care about any of that, any more than she cared about social signals like monosyllabic replies. Perhaps she had always been that way, or maybe she felt her diagnosis had given her licence.

‘What’re you reading? It looks dull. I don’t like to read. I wish they had a telly in here.’ Eva paused, for breath rather than for answers.

‘Oh,’ I said.

She said she was fourteen, but I would have believed her if she’d told me ten or twenty. She was thin and bland, with lank brown hair and a blade of a nose. Eva had tumours in her liver, she said. She asked me what that meant, but didn’t listen when I told her. I’m not sure she even knew where her liver was or what it did.

‘I bet I’m sick all night. This is my first night, you know. I’m going to be puking till we see yesterday’s breakfast. Do you feel sick? I feel a bit ill already. Do you taste lemons?’

‘No.’ I wasn’t sure what I felt like. Wound too tight. Ready to run. Hungry, sick, impatient, unable to stop the equations dancing and blurring on the page . . . a million things at once. But talking about it all wasn’t one of those million things I felt like.

A nurse walked in through the double doors at our end of the ward, her stainless-steel trolley rattling along, laden with bags of virulent yellow toxin.

Behind her, down the long green corridor that led to the outside world, I saw my mother. She should have left the building ten minutes before. I expected her to be nearly halfway home by now, but there she was, facing a tall man in a dark coat. I couldn’t tell much about him given the distance, but even so there was something suddenly familiar there. Not in that everyday sense of recognition but in the déjà vu way: an intense, almost fierce, certainty that I had seen this tableau before. The tall man in his dark coat, the fluorescent corridor lights gleaming on a perfectly bald head. He angled his face toward my mother in anger or concern while she, in a manner that made me doubt if she even were my mother, flinched away as if struck, retreating until her back pressed against the wall, her hands spread to either side like they were feeling for any exit on offer.

The doors swung closed, sealing off the view.

‘I bet I’m sick all night. This is my first night, you know,’ Eva said, and above us the lights dimmed and then for a second shone brighter than they should.

‘Didn’t you just tell me that?’ I asked, glancing at the needle in my arm, the yellow poison queuing for entry.

A momentary frown and she carried on. ‘I’m going to be puking till we see yesterday’s breakfast. Do you feel sick? I feel a bit ill already. Do you taste lemons?’

CHAPTER 2

If crisp white linen and no-nonsense smiles could cure cancer nobody would ever die of it. Sadly, these were merely the window dressings of the National Health Service. I lay in their metal bed at the business end of a long needle and let their poison leak into my veins. Eva talked at me from across the ward, endlessly. I thought the bag dangling beside me would run out of its chemical soup before she ran out of her inane nonsense. But then she did run out, and shortly after began to retch into the cardboard bowl the nurse had brought her. And I realised that she was just scared; a scared little girl whose parents had left her alone with a fatal disease. And I knew I’d been a piece of shit. Again. And the sour smell of her vomit reached me, and I felt sick myself.

‘It’ll be OK, Eva.’ I sounded awkward, even to myself. ‘Hang in there.’

She didn’t reply, just kept her head bowed over the bowl, a line of drool reaching down to join her to the contents.

I looked away, up toward the painful brightness of the ceiling. The chemo bag hung there like an evil yellow raindrop, like those big teardrop vases full of different coloured liquids that they used to put in chemists’ windows. The yellow filled my vision, the ceiling lights focused through it.

‘Nick!’

‘Huh . . . What?’

‘Roll, you dweeb.’ Elton looked pointedly at the table in front of me.

I stood suddenly, toppling my chair and jolting the table. Half a dozen inch-high lead figures fell over, three of them armoured and carrying swords. The other three were larger and brown . . . ogres. Simon had painted those, brilliantly as always. His miniatures made ours look like toddlers had been jabbing at them with the sort of paintbrushes you use on walls.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ I felt twenty feet tall. Vertigo wanted to drag me down and send me crashing onto the table among all the dice and figures, sheets of paper, rulebooks, cans of coke.

‘Nice work, moron!’ John snorted and shook his head. Quite how John came to be in our Dungeons & Dragons group I’d never really figured out. Handsome, popular, at ease in his own skin. He wasn’t the type. Wasn’t our type. Which was probably why he kept our association secret at school. That hurt less that you’d think it would. I guess I was just pathetically grateful to be liked by someone ‘normal’.

Simon was already setting the figures back up amid the sprawl of character sheets and maps, his hands remarkably delicate. Somehow, I always expected Simon’s hands to be as fat and clumsy as the rest of him, but the boy could be a brain surgeon one day. He reconstructed the scene with perfect accuracy, muttering reminders to himself. Simon never forgot a thing. He knew pi to more decimal places than any sane person would want to. I sometimes joked that it was an irrational feat of memory. A maths joke. Nobody ever got it.

‘Roll already!’ Elton arched an eyebrow at me. I knew the expression. It was often followed by a demonstration of a karate move where Elton would talk you through the attack as he put you on your arse in slow motion. Even at quarter speed there wasn’t much you could do about it. Elton knew his stuff. His oldest brother was a black belt and the other three were heading in that direction. All five of them lived in the tiny flat their parents had managed to secure after getting off the boat from Madagascar. Five was too many for the place. With their parents, there were seven of them.

Still confused, I reached for the twenty-sided die.

‘D6!’ Simon thrust a handful of six-sided dice at me. Focused, impatient. ‘Damage roll.’

‘Get with the programme, Nick.’ John leaned his chair back on two legs, showing that easy grin of his. ‘No daydreaming on the job!’

‘But . . .’ I looked around the room. Simon’s bedroom, crowded with books and collectables. Fantasy and science fiction novels, and a shameful section on trains that Simon clung on to despite the fact that even Dungeons & Dragons nerds thought those were deeply uncool. ‘But . . .’ My hand tightened around the dice. I squeezed until the corners bit, trying to shake myself out of this dream. ‘I’ve been here before. Done this before.’

‘Yes . . .’ said Elton. ‘The last time you cast a fireball on a bunch of monsters. Roll the damn damage.’