Thicker Than Water

I realised that that was as far as it was ever going to go between us, and I didn’t mind because it was cool that we’d had that moment of contact rather than a grope, a hangover and a lingering sense of embarrassment.

But whoever it was that stood her up that night, he needed his fucking head examined.

I like the Royal London: it’s got a bit of class, as hospitals go. Tell me it wouldn’t lift your spirits to be wheeled out of an ambulance past that terrific eighteenth-century façade. ‘Bloody hell,’ you’d think, ‘I’m going up in the world.

’ But the neo-brutalist nightmare they’re nailing onto the back of the building is a different bucket of entrails entirely, and for my money you can keep it.

Kenny was in intensive care, Coldwood had said. I walked in off the street, striding straight ahead past the A&E reception desk and the assembled sick and lame. I was gambling on the ancient truism that people are much less likely to challenge you if you look like you know where you’re going, and it seemed to work: or at least it got me a long way, through A&E and Outpatients and into the slightly dilapidated annexe where the intensive-care wards were located.

The dead watched me every step of the way. In fact, I was having to walk right through some of them, because they were as thick on the ground as leaves in autumn - and like leaves in autumn they presented a rich, mesmerising spectrum of decay. Lots of people die in hospitals, and they die from a lot of different things, all of which leave their marks on the spirit as well as the flesh.

Nobody knows why some people get up again after they’ve been laid in the grave and others don’t: Juliet puts it down to a character flaw, a fear of taking the necessary jump head-first into another mode of existence. But she’s always fought shy of explaining how that other life works or where it’s situated or how much a square meal costs there.

These ghosts, anyway, were mostly afraid and mostly confused. Their deaths were variations on a theme: arbitrary, painful, early, undeserved, uncomprehended, lingering, undignified, lonely, pointless.

They were exactly the type - if you can talk about the psychology of the dead with a straight face - to retain the trace of their injuries and diseases in their risen forms. So I was looking at, and stepping through, a standing exhibition of all the horrible things that can go wrong with the human body both when it’s damaged from outside and when it rises against itself.