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and who is standing at his head, mopping up his vomit, checking his drips and worse, and Grace is a good woman too and by their interaction and the looks they exchange a good comrade to Hannah.
    And you should know that I’m a man who hates, really hates hospitals, and is by religion allergic to the health industry. Blood, needles, bedpans, trolleys with scissors on them, surgical smells, sick people, dead dogs and run-over badgers at the roadside, I only have to enter their presence and I’m freaking out, which is no more than any other normal man would do who has been relieved of his tonsils, appendix and foreskin in a succession of insanitary African hill clinics.
    And I have met her before, this degree nurse. Once. Yet for the last three weeks, I now realise, she has been an unconscious imprint on my memory, and not just as the presiding angel in this unhappy place. I have spoken to her, although she probably doesn’t remember. On my very first visit here, I asked her to sign my completion document certifying that I had performed to her satisfaction the duties I had been contracted for. She had smiled, put her head on one side as if deliberating whether in all honesty she could admit to being satisfied, then casually drawn a fibre-tipped pen from behind her ear. The gesture, though doubtless innocent on her part, had affected me. In my over-fertile imagination, it was a prelude to undressing.
    But this evening I am entertaining no such improper fantasies. This evening it is all work, and we are sitting on a dying man’s bed. And Hannah the health professional, who for all I know does this three times a day before lunchtime, has set her jaw against extraneous feeling, so I have done the same.
    ‘Ask him his name, please,’ she commands me, in French-scented English.
    His name, he informs us after prolonged thought, is Jean-Pierre. And for good measure adds, with as much truculence as he can muster in his reduced circumstances, that he is a Tutsi and proud of it, a piece of gratuitous information that both Hannah and I tacitly agree to ignore, not least because we could have told as much, Jean-Pierre being despite his tubes of classical Tutsi appearance, with high cheekbones, protruding jaw and a long back to his head, exactly as Tutsis are supposed to look in the popular African imagination, although a lot don’t.
    ‘Jean-Pierre who?’ she enquires with the same severity, and I again render her.
    Can Jean-Pierre not hear me or does he prefer to have no surname? The delay while Degree Nurse Hannah and I wait for his answer is the occasion for the first long look that we exchange, or long in the sense that it was longer than a look needs to be if you’re merely checking that the person you are rendering for is listening to what you’re saying, because neither of us was saying anything, nor was he.
    ‘Ask him where he lives, please,’ she says, delicately clearing her throat of an obstruction similar to my own; except this time, to my surprise and delight, she is addressing me as a fellow African in Swahili. As if that wasn’t enough, she is speaking in
the accents of a woman of the Eastern Congo
!
    But I am here to work. The degree nurse has asked our patient another question so I must render it. I do. From Swahili into Kinyarwanda. I then render the answer to it, from Jean-Pierre’s Kinyarwanda straight into her deep brown eyes, while I replicate, if not exactly mimic, her deliciously familiar accents.
    ‘I live on the Heath,’ I inform her, repeating Jean-Pierre’s words as if they were our own, ‘under a bush. And that’s where I’m going back to when I get out of this’—pause—‘place’—omitting for decency’s sake the epithet he uses to describe it. ‘Hannah,’ I go on, speaking English, perhaps in order to relieve the pressure slightly. ‘For goodness’ sake. Who are you? Where do you come from?’
    To which, without the smallest hesitation, she declares her nationhood to me: ‘I am