Owen paused. What had happened to that empathy they were just talking about? Now here he was half- joking about somebody's madness, when it was clear the guy was scared out of his mind. What he was saying might not be true, but it was clearly true to him.
'Do you reckon he'll be OK?' asked Owen.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, at St Helen's. I mean, what happens to him next?'
'Chances are he was already being cared for in some capacity, or he has family who are worried sick about him. It's unlikely he'll have to remain there in the long term. The important thing, Owen, is that the moment he walks out of that door you forget all about him. It's not easy, I know it's not, but it's important. If you're a doctor for any length of time you'll get to see hundreds of patients like him, equally out of their minds, equally distraught. You can't go worrying about all of them.'
'You met him?' asked Toshiko.
Owen nodded.
They were in the Autopsy Room, Owen leaning back against the far wall.
'I couldn't say anything. I… I didn't know what to say. What if I'm the reason he's here? And it wasn't just that, it was something else…'
'What?'
Owen took in a deep breath, sighed, and shook his head.
'It's stupid, really. I mean really, really stupid. I was a doctor for how long? Saw everything on the wards. You name it, I saw it. People coming in who you'd barely recognise as human, let alone alive. Burns, car crashes, stabbings, shootings. We had it all.'
'What are you talking about?'
'It was that day,' said Owen. 'It was the same day. One minute I'm talking to Darren Lucas, this kid who's been run over, then I'm talking to Michael, the crazy guy who's been to 1941. I was talking about Michael all afternoon, to the other doctors, and the nurses. I'd almost forgotten about Darren.' He paused. 'He was only nine.'
Owen rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb and walked away from his desk.
'I worked a twelve-hour shift that day,' he said. 'The boy… Darren… he had to wait God knows how long for one of his scans, but I popped in to see him a couple of times, and he seemed OK. His parents were worried sick, but I told them everything was going to be fine. And then, just before they were going to take him up for the scan, he died. Just like that.'
Owen closed his eyes and shook his head.
'It was a blood clot. Something we hadn't picked up;
He paused again, rubbing both eyes with the palm of his hand.
'Darren Lucas. The funny thing is, you get so many patients, and you forget their names eventually, but I never forgot Darren's. I forgot all about Michael. There were dozens more nutters over the years; you can't remember all of them. But now he's back. It must be my fault. It must be something I've done, something I've screwed up. He comes to me all those years ago and now he's back, here, now.'
Toshiko went to him immediately, putting her arms around him. There was a moment, just a moment, when they looked into each other's eyes and neither of them was entirely sure what the embrace meant.
Toshiko broke away suddenly.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'But trust me, Owen. It's not just you.'
FIVE
The fireworks exploding over the River Dojima reminded her of flowers. Like great big burning flowers of pink, and blue, and green. Toshiko Sato's father held her in his arms while behind them, on the river itself, the boats made their way out towards the point where the Dojima meets the Okawa, each one carrying dozens of people, all of them dressed in brightly coloured costumes.
'Smile!' said her mother, and Toshiko and her father beamed for the lens in the seconds before they were both near-blinded by the flash.
The Tenjin Festival was Toshiko's favourite time of year, better than the Cherry Blossom Festival, or the Aizen Festival. Better, even, than the Midosuji Parade, and she
It was only during the festivals that her father ever seemed to have time for them. It wasn't his fault, as her mother often reminded her. Her father was a very busy man with a very important job, and he often had to travel far away, but he never missed the Tenjin Festival.
When the procession of the boats was over, Toshiko's parents walked her back through the city streets, each holding her hand. They stopped at a stall where her father bought her a bag of wagashi sweets, and then they walked down to the nearest subway.
The train was busy, thanks to the festival, and Toshiko spent all of her journey on the Yotsubashi Line surrounded by a forest of people's legs. She held on tightly to a nearby bar and tried not to stumble when the train stopped suddenly in each station. It was a little quieter on the Midosuji Line, but even so she still had to sit on her mother's lap.
By the time they got to their stop, Toshiko was asleep and had to be carried up the steps to their apartment, which overlooked Minami, in the south of the city. On clear days, which didn't come very often, you could see out past the city to the bay of Osaka, and her father had told her that on some days you could even see Kobe, though she didn't believe him.
She woke as her father opened the door and they stepped into the apartment, her mother and father kicking off their shoes. As her mother carried her through to her room, they passed the door to her grandmother's bedroom, and she could hear her grandmother snoring, as she did almost every night. In the mornings, of course, when her mother or father would say something about the snoring, Grandma would deny it, saying they must have been imagining it, which was a source of endless amusement for Toshiko and her parents.
Her mother tried to put her to bed and turn out the light but, having slept for much of the subway journey, Toshiko was restless and wanted a bedtime story.
'All right,' said Toshiko's mother, eyeing her suspiciously. 'You can have a story, but just the one. It's way past your bedtime. Which story would you like? Tin-Tin? The fairy tales?'
'Fairy tales!' said Toshiko, suddenly very much awake, clapping her hands together and bouncing up and down on her bed.
'OK… Fairy tales it is,' said her mother, picking the book from Toshiko's shelf and sitting on the edge of the bed. She opened the book, and began to read.
'This story is called 'The Land Of Perpetual Life'. Many, many years ago, there lived a rich man called Sentaro. His father had been a powerful and wealthy man, and Sentaro inherited his fortunes from him, but he was not hardworking like his father, and spent his time being idle and lazy.
'One day, when Sentaro was thirty-three years old, he thought of death and sickness, and the thoughts made him very sad.
''I would like to live until I am six hundred years old, at least,' said Sentaro, 'so that I am never sick and I am never old. The span of a man's life is far too short.'
'Sentaro had heard stories of people who lived much longer than normal men, and indeed women, such as the Princess of Yamato who, so he'd been told, lived to the ripe old age of five hundred. He had heard stories, too, of a mighty Chinese emperor called Shin-no-Shiko, who had built the Great Wall of China. Despite his riches, his palaces, and his precious stones, Shin-no-Shiko was unhappy because he knew that one day he would die.
'Every day when he woke up, and every night when he went to sleep, Shin-no-Shiko would pray that somebody might give him the famous Elixir of Life-'
'What's an elixir?' asked Toshiko.
'It's like a drink,' said her Mum. 'A drink that makes you live for ever.'
