She was breathing like a Geiger counter – the tick-pop-hum as her chest inflated and sighed, its rhythm more mechanical than human. He lifted her hand into his lap, his thumb completely covering her tiny crowd of knuckles, before seeing how taut this pulled the IV line and letting go, a little more abruptly than he meant to. The hand bounced slightly off the side of the bed. Nothing. He looked to the door. He looked out the window. He shuffled his chair closer to the bed and took the hand again.  

The door opened and one of the nurses came in, then started to back out again, apologising, saying she’d come back later. He said it was fine, come on in, do whatever you have to do. Was he sure? She could give him a minute if he liked. No, honestly. It’s fine. I’m going out in a sec anyway. 

He went outside and lit a cigarette. He heard the rasp in his own breath and wondered what it would take for him to quit. He waved hello to one of the other nurses, one he’d come to recognise as a member of the roster caring for his mother. She was having her own cigarette, a few feet away, under the glare of the next streetlight along. He looked back through the window into the room. 

The cars seemed too leisurely, coming and going and pootling around the car park. 5 mph said the signs. What a ridiculous… he must’ve been doing 30 easy when he got there. But most of these cars weren’t driven by people in the throes of any urgency. They probably weren’t even driven by people who would look back on this day as a particularly memorable one. They were

just driven by people in the first or final stage of a commute. People who’d get home in half an hour or twenty or forty-five minutes and be asked how work was and say yeah, fine. 

Back in the room, the nurse that came in earlier had finished her checks and was updating the chart that hung on the end of the bed. He sat down in the chair without saying anything and after a moment she looked up at him from the chart and said he should really quit, you know. And he stared back, dead-eyed and still, and she mirrored the pose for a moment before leaking a slight smile out of the side of her mouth and biting the end of her pen, and he thought is she really fucking trying to… with my mother here dying in front of me, and she’s… and she walked away. 

He texted his sister to ask how far away they were. She replied instantly saying they were going as fast as they could but José didn’t know the roads coming out of the airport as well so they might be closer to ten than half nine. She’d added a full-stop. He thought about asking her why José was driving and not her, then decided against it. 

He turned to his mother now. The tick-pop-hum. The hand like some instructive model of a hand, with a few crucial elements – muscle, opacity – omitted, so as to highlight others. Bones. Veins. 

The gown. The fucking gown the same as everybody else’s. Imagine that. Imagine expecting someone to die wearing whatever pattern some pen-pusher who worked for a sub-contractor of a sub-contractor had chosen from the three available options presented to him in a Tuesday morning meeting he’d rushed through to get to lunch. Imagine that decision determining how

you look, what you actually look like, how you actually exist for the final time. The last image you’ll give anyone. Baby blue with little black crosses. 

He wanted to ask her a series of questions that would amount, in their approximate collective shape, to: are you done? He wanted to ask her it in the same way she used to ask him the same thing, when he was little, at a playground she’d spent 45 minutes driving him to on a winter weeknight after school. She’d sit on the bench, ignoring his huffing sister’s frustrated knocks on the car window, until he came back to her. Are you done? 

Not fed up, not even hoping he was, just asking. Satisfied? Got what you need? And though still maybe only eight or nine years old he’d feel the embarrassment of her effort, her time, her money on the petrol and her endurance of the cold just for his ten minutes of running around alone, getting all the energy out in the lamp-lit night, shouting can you see me, mum can you see me, can you still see me, can you still see me. 

Time passed. He took his phone out of his pocket and checked where his sister was. He had her on Find My Friends – his earlier question hadn’t been strictly necessary. She’d be there soon. Though they’d just taken the wrong exit at the roundabout. 

He went into his photos app. He found the most recent one of his mother – two weeks ago, propped up in the bed by a thick wedge of pillows, the flowers in her hands, not smiling exactly but looking straight enough at him. Bright red top on.

He saw his sister’s car come into the car park. It came in just like all the others, and José took care to park neatly between the lines. 

He waited to hear the footsteps hurrying down the hallway… Nothing. But surely, today… 

He got up and looked down the corridor. They were at the far end, walking. Just walking. And when they got to the room they didn’t even seem upset. She asked how he was. Yeah, he was… they passed him in the doorway. He looked back into the room. The two of them standing there. Her lying down. The chest. The breath. The hand. I’ll get another chair, he said.