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A family game from childhood haunted me, the rhyme shimmying around in my head. It had come from my mother, who played it in Northern Ireland in the 1920s on the way to picnics on the beach, sometimes Tyrella, sometimes Ballywalter. We played it too, obediently, on the back seat of the car. You crossed two fingers from one hand, opened a little, over the two fingers on the other hand, creating a neat, square, inviting hole in the middle. As you offered the gap to the person next to you, you chanted:

Put your finger in the crow’s nest

The crow’s not at home

He’s gone to Ballywalter to gather shelly stones …

And then, squeezing on the other person’s finger, you shouted:

He’s coming

He’s coming

He’s nipping!

He’s nipping!

And you squeezed and squeezed, and held them, trapped tight by the finger, until they squealed for mercy.

At one of the ward rounds, in a window of comparative sanity, I remember meeting my consultant for the first time. Mariel Purcell was young, a tall cool stylish Irishwoman, with long dark hair she wore loose. She wore sassy dresses and high heels. ‘We are keeping you on the ventilator,’ she told me. ‘You have a lung infection and we are giving you antibiotics.’ Later, when I was off the ventilator, she was more expansive. It was pneumonia. I was strangely thrilled, in the way you are when you’re a kid and you’re going to have something to boast about when you go back to school. It was like being eight again, falling off roller skates and cracking a bone in your wrist. But at that point I was just frustrated. I’m fine, I tried to tell her with my eyes. The purgatory of the ventilator jammed in my mouth was becoming unbearable. I wanted it taken out. I pleaded with the nurses on my alphabet card. W-H-E-N? T-O-D-A-Y? At the weekend, they said. Soon. They lied. Lied repeatedly and prodigiously. The weekend never came. Day followed day. I inhabited some lost bit of space, some cul-de-sac on the dark side, all alone, floating along in my own ghastly spaceship of tubes and sighs. Beep-beep-debeepbeep. Beep-beep-debeepbeep.