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chance to complain. “Anyway, it’ll only be for a couple of weeks.”
    They had worked it all out between them, herself and Della. A conversation almost without words, a quick conference in the hospital corridor. Addie had offered and Della had just nodded. It was the obvious thing to do. Addie was the obvious person, she had nobody to be looking after but herself. And besides, it would do her good to have something to occupy her, that’s what Della was thinking. She’d been spending too much time by herself recently, she’d been moping. Looking after Hugh might be just the thing to take her mind off her troubles.
    When they’re together they refer to him by his first name, they always have done. Can’t see Hugh making the easiest of patients, Della had said. And she wasn’t wrong.
    Addie had gone straight home to her apartment and thrown some things into a suitcase. She’d loaded Lola’s bowl, her brush, and her blanket into a supermarket carrier bag. Grabbed her own coat and scarf and stepped out into the street. A strange feeling, closing the door of the apartment behind her, leaving her carefully constructed life sealed away inside. Her milk-white walls and her white cotton sheets and her lily-of-the-valley soap. The little pots of fresh herbs on the kitchen windowsill and the espresso machine and the Nicholas Mosse mug with the violets on it that she liked to drink her coffee out of in the mornings. She had left the mug behind her on the shelf. She would not try to take her life with her. After all, it would only be for a couple of weeks.
    Why then the sense of dread when she had opened the door of the basement flat? She had felt her throat contract and her shoulders hunch involuntarily as she had stepped inside. Straightaway she had registered the smell of damp. It seemed to seep straight into your bones, making you shudder from the inside out. Even the dog had been reluctant to go inside. It’s not forever, Lola! That’s what Addie had said. But her voice had sounded brittle and unsure. It was Addie who had needed convincing, not the dog. She had dumped her bags onto the bed and fled back upstairs.
    Together Addie and Della had moved Hugh’s bed down into the living room for him, shunting the couch back into the dining room and closing off the double doors. Of course he’d grumbled about it at first. But now Addie was beginning to think he quite liked it. There was something majestic about the whole setup. To concentrate your life into one room, surrounded by all your favorite things. It had been clear he was coming to terms with the arrangement when he’d asked them to bring the Jack Yeats down from his bedroom and hang it over the sideboard.
    A week since the accident and still no friends had come to visit. Addie was beginning to wonder if he had any. Hugh didn’t seem to notice their absence.
    “Did you get any breakfast?”
    “Oh yes,” he said. “The ever-helpful Hopewell made me some toast.”
    Hopewell, the unfortunate nurse who had been hired to help him get up and dressed in the mornings. Naturally, he loathes Hopewell. But it has become a major focal point for him during his convalescence, this hating of Hopewell.
    Hopewell is from Nigeria. Black as the ace of spades, as Hugh would say.
    “I hope I don’t detect a touch of racism in your attitude to Hopewell,” Addie had warned.
    “On the contrary,” Hugh had replied. “My position on Hopewell is quite the opposite of racism. I am assuming that there are very many highly capable nurses, right across the continent of Africa, so I am at a loss to understand how, with all those millions of possibilities open to us, we have ended up with one as singularly useless as Hopewell.”
    What Hopewell makes of her father, Addie shudders to think.
    Hopewell is tall. He must be well over six foot. He’s black, black in the true sense of the word. His eyes are creamy white, his smile washing-powder blue. You could fit a one-euro coin through