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breathed, barely audible.
    Helen allowed him time to collect himself. Jim would not want to show any weakness, to appear vulnerable. He was the head of the family, after all.
    After a while she heard him clear his throat. ‘I would imagine in a situation like this they’ll need someone to identify the body.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Helen. ‘That’s what the police said.’
    â€˜Okay.’ He sounded resolved. ‘I’ll take care of it. I’ll call Steven,and ah, look, I’ll probably drop Noreen around with you when I go. She shouldn’t be left alone.’
    â€˜Sure,’ said Helen. He hadn’t asked her how she was. She hadn’t really expected that he would.
    â€˜You’d better give me the name of the policeman you spoke to.’
    It was because of Jim that Helen and David had met in the first place. Helen had been Jim’s nurse, or one of them, when he had had his first heart attack, and she suspected that attributed to the fact that he had never seemed comfortable around her. She supposed that it was not entirely unreasonable – she’d had to perform various intimate, though routine, procedures on him when he was at his most vulnerable, a condition Jim was not exactly accustomed to.
    Helen had been in the habit of taking her lunch or dinner in a public café, usually with her head stuck in a gossip magazine she’d borrowed from one of the waiting areas. While most hospital staff preferred to hide from the public and use the staff cafeteria, Helen usually preferred to hide from the rest of the staff, be anonymous, and absorb herself in the lives and loves of Hollywood celebrities. It was a guilty obsession. She would never actually buy one of these magazines herself; they were trash, completely fabricated and a load of rubbish. But Helen couldn’t get enough of them. Perhaps reading about the trivial, so-called struggles of the rich and famous made her own situation seem not so bad. Perhaps they simply transported her to other worlds, other lives, lifting her out of her own. Helen didn’t know, and she was not inclined to analyse it too closely in case even this small, harmless pleasure became tainted for her.
    Then, on a particular day in the month of August, David Chapman had walked into the café and collected a cup of coffee and a salad sandwich on his tray, and was making his way to an adjacent table when he recognised her.
    â€˜Hello,’ he said, not exactly displaying a great deal of originality.
    Helen didn’t respond: she was too caught up reading about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s $1.4 million Lavish Fairytale Wedding, recalling a theory she’d heard somewhere that thelevel of fuss a celebrity couple went to over their declarations of love for each other was inversely proportionate to the length of time they would stay together. On the evidence before her she had given them three years, four years tops. But even if Helen had not been absorbed in her magazine, she probably wouldn’t have responded to David’s greeting anyway. Helen would never have assumed anyone was talking to her; the ‘hello’ would have been filtered out as background noise, assumed to be directed towards someone else.
    But David had persisted. He’d cleared his throat and repeated, rather loudly, ‘Hello there,’ and then stooped to read her name tag, adding, ‘Helen, I thought it was Helen.’
    Which was when Helen had abruptly looked up, startled to see a young man – a family member of one of her patients if she was not mistaken – standing there looking expectantly at her, a tray in his hand. He smiled. ‘Mind if I join you?’
    That kind of thing never happened to Helen. At least not since she was a teenager. She’d been reasonably popular at school, certainly not unpopular; she’d had her share of friends, but they had all moved on, while Helen remained in exactly the same