readingrat | fic: The Kelpie - Part I Chapter 2 (Reply)

Part I: Bristol

Chapter 2: Inside Information

Princeton, September 2011

"Dr James Wilson!" the court orderly called out.

The packed courtroom went silent; Wilson was the only defence witness apart from the defendant himself, and so far, the evidence had been staggeringly unequivocal. Wilson straightened his tie, got up and buttoned his jacket. He looked over at House, slumped in his wheelchair, face drawn and haggard, all the former bluster and self-confidence erased. His lawyer, sitting next to him, didn't look much better. Wilson wasn't surprised; he'd been running interference between them for weeks now, doing his best to prevent House from repelling the person standing between him and a major prison sentence. It had been tough going, but hopefully it would be over soon.

He cast a look at Cuddy, seated as far away from House as was physically possible, pale, but determined. She had been on the witness stand already, where she had unintentionally done House a great favour. Her calm manner, the collected way she had recalled the incidents of that fatal May evening, and her dispassionate denial of any previous incidents of violence had worked in House's favour. Had she been tearful or shown the slightest outward sign of trauma or told any tales of domestic terror, the jury might have been moved. As it was, her stoic demeanour worked more to House's advantage than any of the fiery cross-examinations that House's attorney had held for his client as he'd tried to puncture the evidence collected by the police, the statements of the EM team that had been the first to arrive at the site, and the victims' accounts.

House's own behaviour so far, however, had done little to mitigate the impression made by the pictures the state attorney had handed around of the demolished house featuring House's car poking out of the debris of the dining room. He'd sat silent and seemingly emotionless, never lifting his eyes to look at the evidence or at the witnesses, fidgeting endlessly with anything his hapless lawyer left lying within reach of his long fingers and seemingly bored by the whole procedure. He probably was bored, Wilson opined, for House had decided long ago how this was going to end, and he'd told his lawyer as much in the only meeting he'd deigned to attend before the trial.

"Domestic violence. Attempted homicide. First offence. Two years, three years max."
"I'm sure I can get probation for you," Max, his attorney had said with a desperate air.
"I'm not asking you to."
"That's ... my job. To get you a fair deal."
"What's fair about probation after nearly killing four people? I'm paying you because I've been told I can't do this without a lawyer, not because I want to be let off the hook. So go do your job, and don't bother me with 'strategy' or 'making a positive impression on the jury'."

Which would be fine if House were feeling guilt for his deed, but guilt presupposed an awareness of one's misdeeds. House, however, couldn't even remember the events leading up to the crash, let alone the crash itself. His lack of interest in his own fate was not born of a desire to atone for his misdeed; it was in all probability a symptom of depression. 'Probability' being the key word here, because unsurprisingly House refused to entertain the notion that he might be mentally affected by the physical tribulations he had been subjected to, much less allow himself to be examined or treated.

Wilson sat down in the witness stand, unbuttoned his jacket again, answered the questions pertaining to his identity, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When Max asked him to recount the events of the evening, he told the jury everything that had occurred from the moment he had picked House up from his apartment till when House made him leave his car, managing to make his carefully pondered speech sound spontaneous and unrehearsed.

"How would you describe Dr House's mood when you left the car, Dr Wilson?" Max asked.

"Objection!" the prosecutor interrupted.

"Objection overruled," the judge said in a bored voice.

"He was," Wilson put in an artful pause, "disturbed. Disturbed and upset."

"Would you say he was angry?"

"Objection!" the prosecutor repeated. "The defence is influencing the witness with his choice of words."

"Objection sustained," the judge ruled.

"Will you please describe what happened next?"

"Dr House drove the car to the end of the road. There he did a U-turn, and then he accelerated the car back towards me." Wilson was silent for a moment, looking at his hands. This time the silence was not rehearsed. What he was about to do could change the outcome of this trial. Then again, it might not. Either way he'd lose a friend, a good friend, in order to save another one who didn't want to be saved and who, if his memory was playing him false, didn't deserveto be saved. He cast back his mind to that god-awful evening in May, conjuring up an image of himself standing by the curb watching House's car approach at an insane speed, aiming straight at ...

"He ... he was going straight for the tree next to me, a big oak tree. When I realised what he was about to do, I stepped in front of the tree. He came straight on - I thought he'd mow me down. I jumped aside when he was - I don't know how close he was, but it seemed very close - and at that moment he finally swerved."

At this, a rumble of indignation went through the courtroom; it was obvious even to the uninitiated where Wilson was headed, and it was not a direction the vengeful crowd approved of at all.

"So Dr House was not aiming for the house, but for the tree?" Max stated rather than asked.

"Yes."

"What do you think his intention was in driving at the tree?" Max probed. They had agreed beforehand that Wilson was to volunteer his assumption, but now, sitting in the courtroom with House and Cuddy's eyes on him, it was more difficult than he'd anticipated. Max's question sounded stilted, pre-rehearsed, but there was no help for it now.

Wilson cast a beseeching look at House. House stared back stony-faced. He hadn't agreed to this, but not being able to recall a single second of the entire fiasco himself, he had not been in a position to disagree either. "He wanted to kill himself," Wilson said quietly.

There was an instant uproar. The judge banged his gavel; the prosecution looked outraged. The cross-examination, Wilson decided, would not be fun. He didn't dare look at Cuddy.

"Was there any indication that Dr House was suicidal?" Max asked. This question was spontaneous, a result of the vibes of disbelief arising from the courtroom, but Wilson knew what Max wanted to hear.

"Yes. He'd shown signs of suicidal behaviour in the weeks before the crash." Wilson recounted the experiment with the muscle-growing rat drug and the subsequent leg massacre in House's bathroom.

"And other than that?"

"He took an overdose of oxycodone mixed with alcohol once, and he plunged a knife into a socket another time."

"Oh, bullshit!" House's head was up, his mien indignant.

"Silence!" the judge ordered.

"Those were not suicide attempts!" House insisted.

"Mr Delaney, get your client under control," the judge advised.

Max whispered a few words to House. House continued scowling, but he fell silent.

As Wilson had anticipated, the cross-examination by the prosecution was no fun at all.

Given the amount of vicodin House had taken, could he be sure that House was aiming for the oak tree? - No, he couldn't.

Did he make a habit of endangering his own life to save the life of his badass, pill-popping, homicidal friend? (The prosecutor phrased it somewhat differently, but that was the essence.) - He hadn't really had time to think of his own danger when he'd stepped in front of the tree; it had been a gut reaction.

What had made him so sure that House, deterred from killing himself with the help of an oak tree, wouldn't simply swerve towards another tree to impale himself? - He hadn't been sure. He hadn't thought that far; he had been functioning on auto-pilot. He'd tried to avert the most pressing catastrophe without thinking ahead of all further catastrophes that might ensue. (That got him a hushed laugh from the audience.)

Wouldn't House have swerved towards the road rather than towards the house if his intention had not been to harm Dr Cuddy or her property? - He really couldn't answer for House's intentions in swerving towards the house, but since his seat-belt wasn't fastened (the EMT had confirmed that much right at the start of the trial), chances were that House's harming propensities were directed against himself rather than against others.

Why would House, a world-renowned diagnostician and a newly-wed, want to kill himself at all?

That one was easy. "His first relationship in ten years went to pieces, instead of regaining mobility in his leg he induced tumours, he relapsed after almost two years of sobriety, and you're asking why he was feeling depressed?" After that, the prosecution decided to let him go.

Next, Max called House into the witness stand. Wilson had advised against it, but Max, ignorant of the havoc House could create and worried about the impression it would leave if House didn't testify himself, had prevailed. So far Max had only dealt with a bored House, a bored and depressed House. Not with a bored and aggravated House. It wasn't, Wilson told himself soothingly, as if House could incriminate himself in any way. At the worst he'd get the jury members' backs up, but there was no way he could add to the evidence already presented in court. And the sympathy points he earned as he wheeled himself into the witness stand might just outweigh whatever damage he could do by shooting off his mouth.

Max had amassed a stunning compendium of incidents in which House had got assaulted: bar fights, assaults by patients, assaults by patients' families, etc. None of this was new to Wilson - in most cases he'd been the source of the anecdotes, for House had been less than helpful in the preparations for the trial. He'd also refused to rehearse the examination with Max, which had driven Max well-nigh crazy. Nonetheless, Max did a good job with what he'd got from Wilson and House's team; he asked House in each case what had provoked the incident ('My asshattery'), what had happened then ('I got socked on the nose/in the jaw/in the groin'), and how he had retaliated ('I didn't. I'd provoked it, so I got what I deserved.' Or, in the case of patients, 'I got the information I wanted. Why should I have hit back?'). The impression on the jury was good, there was no denying it. Maybe Max knew what he was doing after all.

Next, Max steered towards House's only other relationship, the one with Stacy. Wilson closed his eyes in dismay. He'd warned Max to stay away from that hornet's nest.

"Dr House, were there any physical altercations within that relationship?"

"If you mean, did Stacy hit me, yes. She'd slap me whenever she got mad at me."

"How often was that?"

"Pretty often. I'm not exactly easy maintenance."

"What was your response?"

"I'd let her. The sooner she got over it, the sooner I got laid."

"Did you ever hit her?"

"No."

"Not even when she hit you?"

"No."

"Didn't you try to protect yourself?"

House looked genuinely surprised. "From what? Stacy isn't Superwoman, you know."

"She's," Max consulted his notes, "well over five foot eight and in good shape, I've been told."

"Yeah, well, I'm over six feet and at the time I was in better shape. I was never in any danger."

"Did she throw objects at you?"

"Yep, every now and then. Not as a rule. I really am that irritating," he told the judge confidingly.

"What did you do then?" Max asked.

"I ducked." He gave Max an irritated look. "What did you want to hear - that I caught them and threw them back at her? I didn't."

Max was not amused. Drawing a deep breath, he picked up his notes and glanced through them. "Let me see ... right ... yes. Dr House, how did the relationship with Ms Warner end?"

"She left me."

"Why?"

"We had a disagreement over my health."

"Could you be more specific?"

"She ignored my express wishes and ordered extensive surgery on my leg while I was in a coma. I was pissed. Very pissed. After five months of it she'd had enough."

"I see. How did you react?"

"Drank myself into a stupor. A long stupor."

"And then?"

"And nothing."

"Did you try to contact her? Did you phone her? Drop by her place?"

"I'd just spent months being a total jerk to her. Why would I ...?" House opened his eyes wide in mock realisation. "Oh, you're asking whether I stalked her, got violent, crashed my car through her place. No, I didn't."

"You were dumped by a woman with whom you had been in a committed relationship for five years and whose arbitrary behaviour severely impaired your health, but you had no desire to force a physical confrontation on her," Max stated.

Wilson could have told him that this was a mistake, a big mistake. House had been doing fine so far, but there were a few things one should never do. One, try to put words into House's mouth. Two, make assumptions about his feelings. Three, say anything critical about people House was connected to in any way. Any one of these errors of judgment brought out all the contrariness of the four-year-old hiding in House's breast. A bored, aggravated, and provoked House's breast.

He now drew himself as upright as he could, his head tipped slightly at Max, his eyes narrowed. "Her 'arbitrary behaviour', as you call it, probably saved my life. Nevertheless, I would have liked to take my cane and shove it down her throat." Whether he really believed either of these statements was not something Wilson would have bet a dollar on.

Max closed his eyes in despair. "But you didn't do it," he said weakly, trying to salvage the situation.

House looked down at his lap, his lips pursed. Finally he said, "Nope. I drank and moped."

The rest of the examination was short. Max established that House had no recollection whatsoever of the crash or the time before it, and then ended his examination.

The prosecutor was less benign. "Dr House, what can you recall of the events of May 17?"

"Weren't you listening?"

"Dr House!" the judge reprimanded.

"He's wasting your time and mine," House pointed out.

"You have nothing better to do, unless you consider spending the night in jail for contempt of the court better than this, and I'm getting paid for sitting here. Answer his questions."

"Fine. Nothing. I remember nothing."

"So you're suffering from amnesia."

"Yes. You heard my neurologist's opinion on that."

"I want to hear yours. From what I'm told you're an expert in your own right. What do you think is the cause of your amnesia?"

"It's post-traumatic amnesia, a result of the car crash."

"According to the medical report there was no major head trauma, so it could also be psychogenic amnesia."

"Too bad we'll never know," House said with a quirk that could have been a grin.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but psychogenic amnesia is often caused by stressful situations and is also known as repressed memory syndrome."

House was silent.

"Dr House?" the prosecutor prodded.

"You didn't ask anything."

"So is it possible that someday you'll regain your memories of what transpired that day?"

"It is possible," House said through his teeth.

"And that this hasn't happened yet four months after the incident is, in your eyes, merely a medical misfortune?"

"Misfortune? What the hell gives you the idea that I'd consider it a misfortunethat I can't remember the occasion on which I tried to kill four people or myself?"

"So do you consider it possible that you were attempting to kill Dr Cuddy and her guests?"

"Objection!" Max called out. "He's asking my client to speculate about .."

"Objection sustained."

"Fine," the prosecutor conceded. "Dr House, Dr Cuddy testified that in the early afternoon of that day you," he pretended to consult his notes, "pushed her against a wall. Do you find Dr Cuddy's testimony credible?"

"Objection!" Max yelled.

"Yes," House said, overriding whatever else Max was shouting. "She - she wouldn't lie about something like that." Max buried his face in his hands.

The prosecutor licked his lips. "If you pushed her against a wall using your superior strength, can you be sure that you did not crash the car into her house in order to do her bodily harm?"

House looked down at his hands. "No. No, I can't," he said in a whisper.

Wilson followed Cuddy outside the courtroom. Might as well get it over with now, he thought, tugging at his tie which seemed to be strangling him. She was marching down the hallway at a pace that mirrored her mood: no hip swing, no casual toss of the head, only tense shoulders and a head carried stiffly upright. She stopped short and swung round to face him when she realised who was intercepting her.

"How's Rachel? Better?" he asked.

Cuddy unsurprisingly ignored his peace overture. "Acquitted of attempted manslaughter due to lack of evidence, probation for all the other crap. I hope you're satisfied with what you did!" she spat at him.

"The jury acquitted him, not me," Wilson said. Amazingly, House's admission that he couldn't be sure whether he had tried to kill Cuddy or not had done more for him in the eyes of the jury than all Max's attempts to place him in a good light.

"On the basis of your evidence! I hope you can sleep well at night knowing that a homicidal maniac, a stonedhomicidal maniac, is on the loose. Has it occurred to you that the next time he gets pissed at your dating someone, you'll be in the line of fire?"

"Cuddy, I told the truth. He was driving straight at that tree."

"How come this is the first I'm hearing of it? You said nothing about it when you made your statement to the police that night."

Wilson tugged a tired hand through his hair. "I was in shock. I have no idea what they asked me or what I answered. It was only afterwards, when I was calm enough to let the scene play again before my mind's eye that it struck me what House had been trying to do."

"How convenient!" Cuddy sneered.

"Cuddy, let it go! He's punished enough as it is - he's lost his leg. How do you benefit by putting him behind bars for a few years?"

"The loss of his leg was no punishment. It was the direct result of his stupidity in driving under the influence of vicodin and crashing his car, but there's no connection whatsoever to what he was trying to do to me. Or are you saying that every amputee who loses a limb in an accident is being punished by the deities?"

They were on dangerous ground now. Wilson drew himself up and pointed both hands at her in a parallel downward movement. "Are you saying that your order to have his leg amputated was not connected in any way to his nearly killing you?"

"I didn't 'order' it; I approved of the procedure that the surgeon in charge of the operation advised."

"And if House hadn't just crashed into your dining room, you probably would have gone with Chase's suggestion," Wilson surmised.

"You're saying you can't be held accountable for what you said that evening because you were in shock, but you're holding me...," Cuddy's voice rose half an octave in indignation. She stopped herself and took a deep breath. Then she drew herself upright, a tight, false smile on her lips. "You know, Wilson, you're right. I should have gone for Hourani and Chase's little shpiel and let Chase try to save the leg."

She paused for effect. "Then House would have died in the OT, and maybe I wouldn't be waking up every night in a cold sweat from nightmares in which my bedroom walls collapse and a blue-eyed, hatchet-swinging zombie stands towering above my bed."

She turned sharply on her heel and left him standing there. Wilson stared after her for a long moment, his hand going automatically to the tense muscles at the back of his neck, before he turned back to the courtroom. He froze when he saw House in his wheelchair a mere ten yards from where Cuddy and he had been standing and debating, oblivious to the people exiting the courtroom. It was obvious from the expression on House's face that he'd heard the last part of the exchange, possibly even more. His eyebrows were slightly raised, his eyes wide open, his cheek muscles slack, his mouth soft and vulnerable. He'd seen that look once before, when House had returned to his apartment to find Stacy gone. As Wilson moved towards him, his guts tightening and concern welling up in him, House's mien changed perceptibly. His eyes swivelled away, his facial muscles tightened and his eyes narrowed. Portcullis down, drawbridge up, Wilson thought.

"You okay?" he asked, more as a matter of form than because he expected an honest answer.

"Peachy. Just got bailed out of jail, didn't I, so I can continue on my path of murder and mayhem," House said tightly.

"House, she didn't ...,"

But House was wheeling himself towards the elevator.

"Dr Wilson?" the nurse at the desk calls.

Wilson looks up from his journal in mild surprise. He's sure he has got his day sorted and all his chores done.

"Phone call. It's Dr Cuddy," the nurse smiles. She probably thinks it's romantic, these regular calls that sweet Dr Wilson gets from an attractive woman, and Wilson doesn't bother to disillusion her. Not everyone here is as lucky as he is; that there is no girlfriend out there pining for James Wilson MD is the least of his worries, and many a person here on the ward would be happy to have as few cares as he does.

He rises to take the handset that she's holding out to him, smiling his thanks. Then he moves to a more secluded corner of the room.

"Hello, Cuddy," he says. "A surprise call?" It's not her day to call.

"Peter Barnes," she says in answer. "Does that name ring a bell?"

"Oh, crap," Wilson says, looking around for a chair. "Oh, crap!" He finds one and sinks down in it. Breathe slowly, regularly. "How did you find him?"

"I didn't even know he was lost." This with a hint of sarcasm. Wilson isn't surprised that Cuddy isn't happy.

"Then he found you."

"Ran into me. In England."

That, at least, is no surprise. "What were you doing there?"

"I'm still there. I'm on a medical conference. What is all this about? Why is he running around as Peter Barnes?"

Wilson props an elbow on his knee and rests his forehead on his hand. He can feel the tension knotting up his shoulders. "It's his new identity. Did he recognise you?"

There's a silence at the other end. Then, "He ... pretended not to. Are you saying he wasn't jerking me around?"

"Probably not. He has retrograde amnesia."

"Wilson, compared to you and House I'm a crappy doctor, but I'm not an idiot! He had amnesia right after the crash, but by the time his trial began only the crash itself and possibly a few hours around it were still gone. The rest had all returned. Retrograde amnesia is not a condition that worsens over the course of time."

"This isn't from the crash. It's from afterwards."

"What happened?" Despite everything, he can hear the concern in her voice. Well, that'll disappear in a few moments, once she hears what he has to tell her, because she isn't going to like it. At all.

"He had electroshock therapy." He doesn't know why he's bothering to dish the information out in bite-size portions; Cuddy will wring every little bit of it out of him.

"What for? His depressions? And what the hell went wrong? Total retrograde amnesia is extremely rare."

Wilson sits up and leans back, closing his eyes. There's no way of telling her this that'll go down well, which is why to this day he has never told her about it. House has always been the elephant in their drawing room. She never asks; he never volunteers information. When their friendship picked up again after a four-year hiatus, this was the unspoken pre-condition to their tentative truce.

"It wasn't for his depressions. He - he asked Foreman to do it for him with the intention of erasing his episodic memory."

"That's insane, totally insane! He could have lost a lot more than his episodic memory. Foreman agreed to this? And you didn't stop it?"

"They worked it all out - they bored holes in his skull and placed the electrodes so that his hippocampus would be shocked but the rest left intact. As far as we could tell afterwards, it worked. As for my opinion on the procedure, he wasn't interested. He never has been, has he?" He can't keep the bitterness out of his voice. House did this in the knowledge that if it worked, Wilson would be left back alone, and if it didn't, if it went wrong, he'd be a burden on Wilson for the rest of his presumably short life.

"And what was his aim in electrocuting his hippocampus?" Cuddy asks acidly.

"He said that he only knew one period of bliss after the crash, and that was the short time frame during which he remembered nothing of what had transpired the months before: the break-up, his relapse, the crash. Once the amnesia wore off he was miserable, more miserable than before. He wanted the bliss of ignorance back again. He figured out with Foreman how to do the EST, he got everything ready for his new identity, found a private clinic in England where we could do it, and then ...,"

"So you helped him!" Cuddy accuses.

Wilson's voice rises self-defensively. "It was either that or ... or he'd be six feet under now. The hope of being able to forget was the only thing that kept him from offing himself."

"Great! Amnesia as the new vicodin! You and Foreman can be proud of yourselves."

Her attitude is predictable, but nevertheless annoying. She has no disadvantages from this - she isn't the one who lost her only friend. Quite the opposite, in fact. "You do see that what he did benefits you, don't you? If he has no memories of you, he is no danger to you any longer."

"Excuse me, but if I remember correctly, you were the one who testified in court that he never was a danger to me. You said he was trying to commit suicide, not crash into the house." She pauses, but before Wilson can think of a response she continues, "What I object to is that he gets to forget and live a carefree life at the other end of the world, because he can afford to nuke his brain, while I can't afford to do that. I have responsibilities - a daughter who is dependent on me. I'm stuck in reality, the reality he inflicted on me, with the distrust and the nightmares and the panic attacks every time a car engine howls up the street. This is typical House - he creates havoc in other people's lives, only to disappear to Never-Never Land!"

There is no arguing with that, since it pretty much mirrors his view of the proceedings. They are both silent for some time. "How is he?" Wilson finally asks, when he thinks she may have calmed down enough to answer the question without going into another rant.

Apparently she has. "Good, from what I could tell. Different. I wasn't sure it was really him until you confirmed his identity. At first I thought he has a British doppelganger. He's clean-shaven and has an authentic British accent - at least, it seemed authentic to me. He ... he's the same in some ways, but he's changed in others. And a lot more ...," she stops to think, "relaxed, I'd say. He looks younger, less - scrunched up. He's working as a cook at the hotel that's hosting the conference. His gait - it's almost normal!" She sounds genuinely surprised, and Wilson realises that the last time Cuddy saw House was in court, a gaunt figure hunched up in a wheel chair.

"A cook? How's that working out?" One of his objections to House's amnesia scheme had been that House would never be able to work as a doctor again, but even his, Wilson's, worst-case scenarios had not included a job so little suited to House's need to keep those synapses loaded and firing. "Is ... are his cognitive abilities compromised?"

"I didn't see enough of him to do a complete cognitive panel," Cuddy remarks. "He seemed much the same as usual. I think, though, that he may have gotten himself fired tonight." Her laugh is slightly hiccup-y. "The people at the next table didn't like his sauce. I'll tell you about it when I visit you next."

"That'll be great."

"Why England?" Cuddy asks. "Why a false British identity? Wouldn't it have been easier to have got him one here?"

"I have no idea. House's point was that the moment he woke up from the procedure - if it worked - he'd be trying to find out who he was. After all, once he had amnesia he wouldn't remember that he was trying to forget about himself. If he'd got himself an American identity, he'd have figured out his true identity in no time, because he'd soon have worked out where to look. With a British identity he'll have looked in Britain first, and although he'll have realised by now that he isn't Peter Barnes, it is possible that he'll never figure out that he's an American. And before you ask - he knew that he'd do a perfect British accent and not even know it wasn't his, because apparently it is his accent. One of his accents. His father was based in Britain for three years when he was a child, and later on in Egypt he spent most of his time with a British family that lived there. He said that as a child he'd use both accents interchangeably, so if he woke up in England surrounded by Brits, chances were he'd revert to an English accent and be none the wiser."

After a pause, Wilson asks what is foremost on his mind, "Will you see him again?"

"I'll try."

"Will you tell him who you are? Who he is?" He can feel his anxiety level rising.

There's a noticeable hesitation at the other end. "No. It wouldn't do any good. He might accept who he is, but he won't remember."

Wilson leans his head in his hands in relief. Whatever else he and Foreman and House had anticipated, it had not been that someone who'd known him, really known him, would run into him in England. "I'd ask you to say hi from me, but ...," he trails off, an infinite sadness radiating out from his breast into the cavities of his torso. It's not fair, it just isn't fair! He spent years, decades, keeping House from self-destructing, only to have to let his friend go in the end, and now it's Cuddy, the woman who dropped House when he needed her, who gets to see him and talk to him, to see how he's doing, how he's living, whether he's happy, whether he has friends ...

"Yeah," Cuddy says quietly. Knowing him as well as she does, she probably senses what he's feeling. "I'll tell you all about him when I come back. Good night, Wilson."

It's still light outside in Pennsylvania, but in Bristol it must be around midnight. "Good night, Cuddy," he says.

He gets up to return the handset to the nurse. When she takes it he moves away, but then he turns back to the desk. "Ah, Emma?" he says. She raises an enquiring eyebrow. "Could you ask Dr Nolan whether he has time for an extra session with me tomorrow? I think I may need it."

"Sure, Dr Wilson," she says, noting it down in the protocol. "Would you like to see him now?"

Wilson wonders whether his distress is so visible. "If he can make it. Yes, that would be nice."

"I'll ask," the nurse says. She takes up the telephone. Wilson returns to the ward and picks up his abandoned journal. He stares at the pages blankly, his mind on another man who once spent some months here.