Demus let out a long sigh at my stupidity. ‘I remember when I was you and a black BMW pulled up in front of me and Mia just after her mum cut Rust at the flat in the Miller Blocks. The next thing I remember is being in the park nearly two weeks later.’

‘Ah.’ I saw it then. ‘We need the chip soon so I can forget everything from the BMW up to the park.’ I really didn’t want to forget dancing with Mia, or the upcoming party. ‘Can’t you just erase those days years later?’

He shook his head. ‘Has to be done soon after they were formed, or you risk losing important stuff, like remembering how to eat or walk. You’ve got four days tops. Sorry about the timing. It wasn’t mine to choose.’

He started to hobble off.

‘Wait! When do I see you next?’

‘Twenty-five years, for sure. Just look in the mirror. You’ll see me coming.’ He waved over his shoulder.

‘You’re bugging out? Seriously?’

‘I don’t know, Nick.’ He turned, raising his voice to cover the growing gap. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘You should come with us, help us get in and find the chip!’

‘I don’t think it happens that way, Nick.’ He smiled though an air of sadness hung around him. ‘And I have other things to do.’

I watched me go, dogged by the feeling that there was something important I was forgetting to ask him.

I got to the ward late and endured the tutting of Nurse Smithson as she poked ungently in search of a vein. When at last I was plumbed in, I sat in the chair beside my allotted bed and fished out one of the books I’d bought. There would be time for Demus’s toys and instructions later. I was still irked that he’d left me the task of inventing the damn things. Like an exercise for the student.

I thumbed through my big fat copy of The Lord of the Rings to where I’d left the page folded. It was a comfort read. I knew the story backwards. For a quarter of an hour or so Tolkien had my full attention. Hobbits, elves, a king without a crown. A quest focused on a small but crucial object about which the world unknowingly revolved. But with the turning of each page, I felt a scraping at the back of my mind. Not an irritation, not something that was there and shouldn’t be, but the absence of something, like the missing tick of a loud clock that has finally wound down. I set the book beside me.

‘Where’s Eva?’

In the bed next door, David rolled my way. He was fourteen and had also been a target for Eva’s stream of consciousness oversharing. ‘ICU.’

‘Hell.’ When I’d first heard that term I understood it as ‘I see you.’ But the acronym stood for Intensive Care Unit, and it wasn’t a place you wanted anyone to see you.

‘Where you going?’ David sat up as I got to my feet.

‘Checking on her, of course.’ I pushed my drip stand ahead of me. It was on a splayed foot set with six caster wheels and should have been easy to steer. Instead, like every supermarket trolley ever, it wanted to veer into any given obstacle.

I reached the nurses’ station at the entrance to the ward and answered the expectant gaze of the woman on duty with a lie. ‘I think there’s something wrong with David. He’s frothing at the mouth.’

As she hurried to investigate, I left the ward unhindered.

The good thing about hospitals is that they’re always full of directions. I took the lift to the sixth floor and followed the signs to the ICU. I drew the occasional glance in my hospital gown with accompanying chemo takeout, but nobody challenged me.

Getting into the ICU was a matter of timing. I had to wait almost half an hour for my moment, which was also long enough to be sure that David hadn’t grassed me up, since nobody came to collect me.

The number of nurses at a nurses’ station is governed by a well-known mathematical distribution named after Siméon Denis Poisson and demonstrated by him in 1837. It was famously used to describe and predict the number of cadets kicked to death by their horses at a Prussian military academy, but it works equally well for nurses. Random events conspire to call the nurses from their station, and if you bide your time, the number on duty will eventually be zero.

I walked in past the empty reception, checked the board beside it and found that Eva Schwartz was in Room 5, then proceeded toward her door.

I pushed into the room. It felt as though it should have been darkened but it wasn’t. Painfully bright hospital lights picked out every detail in harsh relief. Machines crowded the room, more of them than they could possibly be using. A sats monitor charted respirations, blood O2, and heart rate, a cylinder dispensed oxygen along a plastic tube, a drip stand offered intravenous fluids, other tubes drained the excess, additional leads made their enquiries and reported to boxes of electronics all humming and beeping to themselves. The room was white. Too white. The sheets could star in any washing powder commercial. And, in their midst, staining their perfection, the uncooperative human stubbornly dying amid this array of cleverness and invention.

Eva looked very small in that bed. Very alone in that room among the gently murmuring medical equipment.

I navigated a path around the various stands to crouch in her eye line. She wasn’t asleep, but I couldn’t tell if she saw me. ‘Hey.’ I thought I should have more to say. If not me, then who? We were walking down the same path. ‘Eva . . .’

She studied me from some distant place, her dark eyes hardly moving. Her cracked lips made no attempt at words.

‘Look . . . I . . .’ I pulled up a plastic chair almost identical to the ones at school and winced at the scraping noise. I sat where she could see me. ‘I’ve been caught up in my own stuff, Eva. And I’m sorry. I should have been a better . . . person . . . better friend. I’ve been rude when I should have been kind. You wanted someone to hear you. We all do really.’

I watched her, and she watched me back, a papery residue of dried saliva on her dry lips. ‘They’ll come and take me out of here soon enough, I guess.’ I glanced at the door. ‘I’m not used to being the one doing the talking here.’ I tried a smile, but it hurt my face. There was an ache in my chest from emotions that wouldn’t fit right. Some of it was the self-pity that Demus had refused to show me. ‘I don’t know if it helps, Eva, but . . . there’s so much more to this world than I ever thought there was . . .’ I bit my lip and thought of the worlds splitting away from us at every moment in infinite profusion. There were an infinity of Evas living every kind of life. Evas who survived her cancer, Evas who never got cancer in the first place, Evas who got killed in a car crash on their way to the diagnosis, Evas who flourished and realised their ambitions, and grew fat and old and happy. Every possibility probed. The good and the bad. I didn’t know if it mattered. All I cared about was the Eva in front of me, her breath rattling in, rattling out, her heart beating across a screen.

I understood then why Demus needed me to be him, needed my Mia to be his Mia. We might live in a multiverse of infinite wonder, but we are what we are, and can only care about what falls into our own orbit. ‘I guess I’m just saying that none of us really know what’s going on or why, and that we never know what’s happening or where we’re going.’ I was babbling and knew it. I took her hand and the smallest smile reached her mouth.

The door opened, and a dark-haired nurse hissed at me. ‘You need to come out of there. Right now.’

‘I’m staying until her parents come.’ I took tight hold of the bed rail, then met the woman’s stare. ‘And you can’t make me leave.’

CHAPTER 17

The night after my last session of chemo was the night of the Arnots’ party. John phoned me four times between getting home from school and coming over.

‘What are you wearing?’ That was the first call.

‘Uh. Clothes?’ I hadn’t given the matter any thought at all.

‘Duh. But what clothes?’

‘The ones I’m wearing.’

‘Really?’ He managed to put enough doubt into a single word to make me question myself. And he hadn’t even seen what I was wearing.

‘No, you’re right, I’m going to change into spandex and those glam rock trousers I have to oil my legs to get into.’

‘ . . .’

‘Jeans and a T-shirt. Now get your arse over here, because we might have to abduct Simon.’

The next call was about booze.

‘Can you get a bottle of red and two bottles of white?’

‘Wine? John, your father has a fucking cellar full of the stuff.’ I’d been down there. There were literally thousands of bottles. Several dozen of them dust-laden vintages from the 1930s.

‘Yeah, but he’s wised-up to me taking it. There’s a combination lock on the door now!’

I glanced toward the living room where Mother was reading and lowered my voice to a hiss. ‘If you can’t crack his wine cellar, it doesn’t bode well for breaking into his secure laboratory!’