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from somewhere inside his giant robe. He must have been the only person left who wasn’t using roll-ups to smoke illegal substances. He flashed his toothless grin and as the nurse advanced towards him he stuck his smoking paraphernalia under the sheet.
    ‘Just pulling your leg, sweetheart,’ he said.
    She took his blood pressure, shaking her head.
    But when she left he produced his baccy tin and his papers. He winked at me slyly.
    I walked down to the nurses’ station. The Filipina was there with a large Jamaican duty nurse. They looked at me as if I had done something wrong.
    ‘Your father is a very sick man,’ the duty nurse said. ‘There’s fluid on his lungs and I don’t know how much longer he can breathe unaided, okay? And of course you are aware that the cancer is at an advanced stage.’
    ‘He’s not my father,’ I said.
    ‘Friend of the family?’ the duty nurse asked.
    ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I said.
    It was clear they wanted the bed. They wanted him out of there. But they would not discharge him without someone to take care of him. And I realised that just because I had been dumb enough to give him my business card, the National Health Service were nominating me.
    ‘I hardly know him,’ I told them. ‘He was a friend of my father’s. I’ve only met him once. I think he has children. Do his children know? Can’t his children come?’
    The nurse looked at me as though I had suggested putting him in a plastic bag and leaving him on the pavement. But she talked to Ken and got a couple of telephone numbers from the old boy. There was a daughter in Essex and a son in Brighton. I quickly took out my phone and began calling.
    I got through to an answer machine. And then another answer machine. I left messages on both – telling them what had happened to their father, telling them to come quick, telling them to call me back. Then I held my phone, expecting it to vibrate at any moment. But it did not stir, as if his children were reluctant to claim him too.
    Down the hall I could hear a Jamaican accent telling Ken Grimwood that there was no smoking on hospital premises.
    And as I stared at the silent phone in my fist, I could hear the mocking sound of the old man’s laughter.

Three
    Joni grinned at me with her vampire smile.
    Her two front teeth were both gone now. The wonky one had come out in her sandwich and the one next to it had quickly come out in sympathy. It must have been looser than she knew when she was focusing all her attention on the wonky one. So now when she smiled the milk teeth that remained at the sides of her mouth appeared like fangs.
    ‘I’ll brush my teeth,’ she said, and her gummy grin gave her a jaunty air, like a sailor on shore leave. ‘You get the book.’
    ‘Okay.’
    She had strict bedtime rituals. When she was in her pyjamas and her remaining teeth had been cleaned, she hugged everyone who was in the house and told them she loved them. But she didn’t kiss anyone, because kissing was gross this year. Then she trooped up to her room and I read her a story. As she settled herself under the duvet, I looked at her bookcase for something suitable.
    Joni was at that awkward age when she was getting too old for princesses and fairies but was still too young for anything to do with having a crush on boys. My wife and I had made half-hearted attempts to interest her in the Hannah Montana industry and the High School Musical business but when Joni watched the TV shows, or saw the DVDs, she was unmoved by all those white teeth, all that canned laughter and all those teenage children trying to talk like they werein a Neil Simon play. Joni was never going to go for cheesy American rubbish. So I stuck with the classics.
    Terrible curses. Murderous adults. Wicked stepmothers. Beautiful maidens being taken to the woods for slaughter. Girls drugged and placed in glass coffins. All the stuff to give a seven-year-old a good night’s sleep.
    Tonight it was Aurora.
    We settled