Thicker Than Water

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I’d like to thank my brother, Dave, who went back to Liverpool with me so I could check my memories against what’s left of the reality. It was a strange time, and it would have been a lot harder without him. Thanks also to A, who wrote the original on which Mark’s poem is based, and taught me what little I know about how it feels to be in that place.

To Barbara and Eric, with love

This is kind of how it would have looked, if you were watching from the outside — and this is how the papers reported it when they finally got hold of the story.

Ten minutes shy of midnight on 3 July, a van pulled off Coppetts Road into the front drive of the Charles Stanger Care Facility in Muswell Hill, North London. It was just a plain white Bedford van, unmarked and with very high sides, but it parked right in front of the doors in the bay marked AMBULANCES ONLY.

One woman and two men got out of the van — the woman in an immaculate black two-piece, the men in pale blue medical scrubs. The woman was wearing large, severe spectacles which gave her a stern schoolteacherly appearance — although she was unsettlingly beautiful, too, and she carried herself in a way that made the sternness seem to be an ironic — almost a provocative — pose. She checked her reflection in the nearside mirror, tilting her head to the left and then to the right while staring at herself critically out of the corners of her eyes.

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