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station platforms. This was Smulders being nostalgic, I decided. Smulders returning to happier days, when he still worked for the railways. He was particularly keen on departures and arrivals, the times, as always, strangely fastidious, almost neurotic: the 5.44 to somewhere, the 21.16 to somewhere else. And, every now and then, there were warnings, prevarications, excuses – especially excuses. A train had derailed. Points had failed. There was a cow on the line, or a child. Or a leaf.
    I became addicted. Smulders sent me on journeys I had never thought of (once I even left the country!). Smulders offered me rail passes. Smulders marooned me on the platforms of obscure provincial stations, then told me that the next train wasn’t due for three hours. I ate terrible food at stainless-steel kiosks. I got indigestion. Chilblains. Flu. Smulders apologised and I forgave him. His announcements took me out of the closed world of the clinic and put me somewhere else, somewhere real. They could often have the same effect as lullabies, long lists of destinations taking the place of sheep.
    Then, one night, Smulders didn’t talk. I waited in the darkness, ears cocked. Nothing. Not even a murmur. Somehow I resented it; this was a service I’d come to expect, rely on. How else was I going to get through the night? I wasn’t going to risk another visit to the broom cupboard and I was tired of making maps out of the cracks on the ceiling. I wanted entertaining. I wanted announcements.
    I decided to try something.
    I crept across the gap between our beds. I paused. Smulders was asleep, his breathing coarse as someone tearing lettuce. I stooped over him. There was an intriguing shape to Smulders. It was as if his belly was the clumsy packaging for something else. Strip away the blubber and you’d come across it: a large cardboard box, containing some kind of domestic appliance. A TV, maybe. A Jumbo microwave. A tumble-dryer. I stooped lower. Ah yes. The reek. The stench. The butter trapped in trenches that were almost bottomless. I placed my lips as close to his ear as I dared. I composed myself. Then, softly, I began: ‘Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . .’
    A big round moan rose from Smulders’ lips –
    ‘ Ch -Ch . . . Ch -Ch . . . Ch -Ch . . . Ch -Ch . . .’
    – but he could not resist: ‘The train now departing …’
    I tiptoed back to bed.
    He kept it up for more than an hour. There were the usual time-tables. There were details of various connections. And there was something new – a convoluted explanation of the reason why a commuter train scheduled for an 18.04 departure had been cancelled, together with an appropriately long-winded apology. I lay there imagining the people massed in front of the departures board, their faces at angles of forty-five degrees. They’d be fuming . I smiled and turned on to my comfortable side.
    The last thing I heard before I fell asleep that night was a reminder that smoking was forbidden on all platforms. I imagined that Smulders, with his great appetite for cigarettes and the freedom, presumably, to smoke them in his office, must always have relished that particular announcement.
    ‘You have a visitor,’ Nurse Janssen told me.
    Visser stood beside her. I detected an exchange of glances that I didn’t understand. The thick air of conspiracy hung around my bed.
    ‘Someone to see you,’ Nurse Janssen said.
    I raised myself a little higher on my pillows. ‘Oh?’
    ‘It’s your fiancée, Claudia.’
    She’d visited before, apparently, while I was either medicated or unconscious. I’d been told how she would sit beside my bed with one of my hands in both of hers. A lovely girl, Claudia; that was the general consensus. It had even been suggested that her devotion had helped to pull me through.
    I didn’t say anything for a moment. I didn’t like people gushing, I never had; I didn’t like mindless