The Last Letter from Your Lover

a man was coughing. It went on and on, a polite, staccato tattoo, as if something was caught at the back of his throat. He did it even in his sleep. Anthony O’Hare let the sound recede to some distant recess of his consciousness, just like everything else. He knew the tricks now. How to make things disappear.
    ‘You have a visitor, Mr O’Hare.’
    The sound of curtains being pulled back, light flooding in. Pretty Scottish nurse. Cool hands. Every word she said to him was spoken in the tone of someone about to bestow a gift. I’m just going to give you a little injection, Mr O’Hare. Shall I get someone to help you to the lavatory, Mr O’Hare? You have a visitor, Mr O’Hare.
    Visitor? For a moment hope floated, and then he heard Don’s voice through the curtains and remembered where he was.
    ‘Don’t mind me, sweetheart.’
    ‘I certainly won’t,’ she said primly.
    ‘Lie-in, is it?’ A moon-sized ruddy face somewhere by his feet.
    ‘Funny.’ He spoke into his pillow, pushing himself upright. His whole body ached. He blinked. ‘I need to get out of here.’
    His vision cleared. Don was standing at the end of his bed, arms folded, resting on his stomach. ‘You’re not going anywhere, sonny Jim.’
    ‘I can’t stay here.’ His voice seemed to come straight from his chest. It croaked and squeaked like a wooden wheel in a rut.
    ‘You’re not well. They want to check your liver function before you go anywhere. You gave us all a fright.’
    ‘What happened?’ He could remember nothing.
    Don hesitated, perhaps trying to judge how much to say. ‘You didn’t turn up at Marjorie Spackman’s office for the big meeting. When nobody had heard from you by six p.m. I got a bad feeling, left Michaels in charge and shot over to your hotel. Found you on the floor, not too pretty. You looked worse than you do now, and that’s saying something.’
    Flashback. The bar at the Regent. The wary eyes of the barman. Pain. Raised voices. An endless careening journey back to his room, clutching at walls, swaying upstairs. The sound of things crashing. Then nothing.
    ‘I hurt all over.’
    ‘So you should. God knows what they did to you. You looked like a pin cushion when I saw you last night.’
    Needles. Urgent voices. The pain. Oh, Jesus, the pain.
    ‘What the hell is going on, O’Hare?’
    In the next bed, the man had started coughing again.
    ‘Was it that woman? She turn you down?’ Don was physically uncomfortable discussing feelings. This manifested itself in a jiggling leg, in the way his hand ran backwards and forwards over his balding head.
    Don’t mention her. Don’t make me think about her face. ‘Not as simple as that.’
    ‘Then what the hell is all this about? No woman’s worth . . . this.’ Don’t hand waved distractedly above the bed.
    ‘I – I just wanted to forget.’
    ‘So go and sling your leg over someone else. Someone you can have . You’ll get over it.’ Perhaps saying it would make it true.
    Anthony’s silence lasted just long enough to contradict him.
    ‘Some women are trouble,’ Don added.
    Forgive me. I just had to know.
    ‘Moths to a flame. We’ve all been there.’
    Forgive me.
    Anthony shook his head. ‘No, Don. Not like this.’
    ‘It’s always “not like this” when it’s your own—’
    ‘She can’t leave him because he won’t let her take the child.’ Anthony’s voice, suddenly clear, cut through the curtained area. Just briefly, the man in the next bed stopped coughing. Anthony watched his boss grasp the implication of the sentence, the creeping frown of sympathy.
    ‘Ah. Tough.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Don’s leg had begun to jiggle again. ‘Doesn’t mean you had to try and kill yourself with drink. You know what they said? The yellow fever screwed your liver. Screwed it, O’Hare. One more drinking session like that, and you . . .’
    Anthony felt infinitely weary. He turned away on his pillow. ‘Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.’
    For half an hour after he’d returned from the hospital, Don sat at his desk, thinking. Around him the newsroom was waking slowly, as it did every day, a sleeping giant spurred into reluctant life: journalists chatting on telephones, stories rising and falling on the newslists, pages formed and planned, the first being mocked up on the production desk.
    He rubbed his hand across his jaw, called over his shoulder towards the secretaries’ desk.
    ‘Blondie. Get me the number of thingy Stirling. The asbestos