Scene 1- Showing up with Cris for an appointment for a CAT scan at 1.00am at Hospital Clinic where there is no one around. The guard at reception gives us complicated directions down wide empty corridors and down into the basement. We wander about like lost souls, seeing no one, and eventually find our way down to the right place. The Shining!

Scene 2 – Having found the right place we sit down in the waiting room and the only two other people there are a chatty Catalan lady with verborrea and her dour Peruvian partner who reminds me of Nosferatu. Within minutes a young lad in white appears – he looks like he might have to get up to go to school tomorrow – and ushers Cris away. The half hour or so I wait, I get up and go to the bathroom a couple of times.

Scene 3 – Cris is released and we wander about the basement, lost and attempting to find our way up and out, trying corridors and doors blindly, wondering morbidly if the next one might be the one that opens onto the morgue.

Scene 4 – We are in a cab and giggling, on our way home. The South Asian driver says nothing; he has a Hand of Fatima swinging from the rearview mirror with metronomic precision. He stops at the corner next to our flat and I pay the fare with plastic. By way of thanks, as he is swiping my visa, I slip the calling card I’d found in the hospital bathrooms into the back of the headrest. It advertises Chinese hookers at a credit-crunch discount rate.