‘Don’t you know how to behave when there is a death!’

A man, a strutting doctor I think, shouted this, slamming down two plastic signs (I couldn’t see what was written on them) onto the floor of the hospital ward I was working in as a nurse. Then he swang the doors closed. He was balding and wearing a brown suit. The doors were brown too. Earlier on there was something about either 13 or 31 people, hiding by railway sleepers just out of Kings Cross station which seemed to blur into the hospital ward.

H’s mother is about to die – I mean in real life, not a dream.

I am at some large cafe with H and our children. H tells me that a government agency has told her that I have a brain tumour. this is rather a shock to me. then I am lying down in her house or rather a large hall while a nurse she has arranged aims a radiotherapy machine at my head from an upper gallery. I lie down and have the treatment while some other people walk around. then we are back at the table and she is telling me about all the scans of my skull she has seen including some oblique (ho) fisure that runs right through my skull. I am impatient to learn more from her. I am trying to adjust to this news and thinking of our children who are at the table too. Then I think this is just the kind of situation that could be a dream so I shake and shake my head saying ‘this is only a dream’. It doesn’t work and I say ‘So this isn’t a dream’. then I shake and shake more vigourously and then wake.