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'Is there anything I can bring you?' he inquires.

His father makes tiny scrabbling motions with his left hand, whose fingernails, he notes, are not clean. 'Do you want to write?' he says. He brings out his pocket diary, opens it to the page headed Telephone Numbers, and proffers it together with a pen.

The fingers cease moving, the eyes lose focus.

'I don't know what you mean,' he says. 'Try again to tell me what you mean.'

Slowly his father shakes his head, left to right.

On the stands beside the other beds in the ward there are vases of flowers, magazines, in some cases framed photographs. The stand beside his father's bed is bare save for a glass of water.

'I must go now,' he says. 'I have a class to teach.'

At a kiosk near the front entrance he buys a packet of sucking sweets and returns to his father's bedside. 'I got these for you,' he says. 'To hold in your mouth if your mouth gets dry.'

Two weeks later his father comes home in an ambulance. He is able to walk in a shuffling way with the aid of a stick. He makes his way from the front door to his bedroom and shuts himself up.

One of the ambulancemen hands him a cyclostyled sheet of instructions titled Laryngectomy – Care of Patients, and a card with a schedule of times when the clinic is open. He glances over the sheet. There is an outline sketch of a human head with a dark circle low in the throat. Care of Wound, it says.

He draws back. 'I can't do this,' he says. The ambulancemen exchange glances, shrug. It is not their business, taking care of the wound, taking care of the patient. Their business is to convey the patient to his or her place of residence. After that it is the patient's business, or the patient's family's business, or else no one's business.

It used to be that he, John, had too little employment. Now that is about to change. Now he will have as much employment as he can handle, as much and more. He is going to have to abandon some of his personal projects and be a nurse. Alternatively, if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One or the other: there is no third way.

Table of Contents

Title

By the Same Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Author's Note

Notebooks 1972–75

Julia

Margot

Adriana

Martin

Sophie

Notebooks: undated fragments