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the back of his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand, fingers that prickle with arthritis. He awakens to the pity of it all , for I was up only . . . he struggles on to his other side so he can check the clock radio on the bedside table . . . three quarters of an hour ago , when he stood in the musty toilet, his sweaty forehead pressed against the mildewed wall, dropsical – late-onset hydrocephalus? and stared stupidly at the splutters unceasing , a plip here, a plash there . . . then at the ecclesiastical window with its opacity of wormy smears – out there breaks the blank day – then at a toilet roll once dampened, now dried, its lumpy multi-ply reminiscent of epidermal corruption not seen since student days – keratitis, rhagades, the stigmata of congenital syphilis – and then only as plates in textbooks. On the lino, by the El Greco of his old feet, there was a pile of old proceedings, peedewed , to be read at stool , and so the memory’s overlay peels back to reveal the exact same vignettes – wall, toilet roll, medical journals – and Busner realises that I have returned! A triumphalism he acknowledges to be inappropriate for a sleepy walk even as he looks to the window and vermiculated quoins comes from somewhere – but where? Then, as he turns, not bothering to flush, and shuffles back towards bed, it occurs to him that he troubled to ask someone he knew then, someone who had specialist knowledge, because they were so ugly, those worm-riddled blocks set into the gateposts of the hospital – but which hospital? There had been so many – Twenty? Thirty? – up until his retirement the year before, after hanging on at Heath far longer than I should’ve . . . and why? Almost certainly to postpone this present mode of life, one his children viewed as pathological, a senile depression – possibly the forerunner of dementia – that had been kept at bay by his pottering, his peculiar job-reductivism, consulted as he had been mostly by other consultants. Busner knows better: this is the re-emergence of an essential self, long since buried and worm-eaten . . . The passage from the toilet to his bedroom is narrow and angles around a portion of the adjoining and more modern office building, an insurance company which, in the process of construction, somehow managed to exact a few cubic feet from this end-terrace Victorian property of no distinction, a brick and masonry cell like all the rest — A burst of clickety-clack from the keyboards of the brokers who factor risk within inches of his sloped shoulder almost derails him. John! he hears one call, quite distinctly: John! Female, fifty-three, ten years no-claims – one for John at Aviva? They’re all called John , while here am I, a prophet in the wilderness . . . There is no soft Persian runner beneath his feet, as there would be at Redington Road, only coarse and colourless carpet offcuts that he himself had pulled from a wheelie-bin in back of the discount furniture store in Cricklewood, Slumberland! , where he had picked up the few sticks needed to prop up this domestic scene, this granddad flat. Granddad! Granddad! You’re lov-ley, Granddad! Granddad! We lo-ove you! It’s a curse and a blessing, this, as he shuffles through the doorway and spies, clasped by April morning sunshine, the bars of his bedstead, with clumps of his damp straitjacket wadded between them. To incontinently recall these, the lyrical leftovers and junked jingles of seven decades, would be an affliction . . . timeitus , he smirks . . . had Busner not come to appreciate, since his retreat here to the first-floor flat on Fortess Road, that within the patterns made by their effervescing in the pool of his consciousness are encoded wider meanings – he balks at truths – ones not surveyed or even guessed at by the mental mapmakers with whom he has spent his working life, notwithstanding the elegance of their modelling – theoretical, neurological – or the crassness of