Mary’s window overlooks the block car park, the street beyond that, the recreation centre, and then a housing estate. There’s plenty going on, what with the cars and buses, kids messing about outside the centre and so on. The leaves of the young trees in their planters flash silver when they ruffle in the wind, and small clouds hang in the sky, so perfectly formed they hardly seem real.

Mary spends quite a bit of her time in a chair in front of the window, dividing her attention between what’s going on outside, a small television screen, and a large gerbil cage. The cage, like the block, is on two levels. The bottom half is generously filled with straw and shavings, and there’s a syringe of water hooked on the bars, poking in. There’s a ladder leading up to the top half, which is essentially a separate, suspended cage, filled with brightly coloured plastic toys. There’s also a narrow yellow tube that feeds out of the upper cage, runs round the outside of the whole thing, and exits back into the straw and shavings at the bottom. Currently, there’s no sign of the gerbil.
‘He’s normally out and about in the morning,’ says Mary, settling back into her chair after letting me in. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he wore himself out last night.’
‘We used to have hamsters,’ I tell her, putting my bag down. ‘They only seemed to come out at night. You could hear the wheel squeaking sometimes.’
‘Gerbils are different,’ she says. ‘More social.’

We chat about this and that through the assessment. Mostly about her late husband, Alan.

‘We weren’t together long,’ she says, passively surrending a finger for me to jab. ‘I hardly saw him. He was off out a lot, running around. I used to hear a lot of stories. He was more interested in his cars. You know – doing deals. In the end I thought enough was enough and I gave him his marching orders. Funny thing was, we got on a lot better when we separated. I could see what I saw in him first time round. I remember the last holiday we took together. We went to this holiday park on Hayling Island. I spent the morning tidying up the caravan. ‘Course – Alan was nowhere to be seen. Anyway, eventually there was a knock on the door, and I thought What’s he playing at, knocking on the door? Only it wasn’t Alan, it was the park manager, a woman called Irene. Beautiful hair, all piled up. I said to her ‘I thought you were Alan’. She said ‘No. He’s stuck under my bonnet, trying to get me started. No – he sent me round with this.’ And d’you know what it was?’
‘No. What was it?’
‘A lettuce.’
‘A lettuce?’
‘A lettuce. I said to Irene, I said ‘What on earth did he mean by that?’ And she turned round and said ‘I don’t know. Maybe he thinks you’d like it.’

As I pack my things away there’s a tentative rustling in the straw at the bottom of the cage.
‘Oh – watch out!’ says Mary.

Mrs Moretz lives with her husband in a narrow, brightly-painted terraced house in the centre of town. Mr Moretz opens the door to me. He’s a hunched and shuffling figure, warmly dressed despite the heat in a fisherman’s jersey, corduroy trousers and dilapidated brown moccasins. He has one of those faces you think you see sometimes in the trunk of an old tree, or a volcanic plug.
‘Who’ve you come for?’ he says. ‘Or is it buy one get one free?’

Mrs Moretz is sitting at an angle on the sofa, her hands neatly folded in her lap, like she’d been expecting me all along, or at least, heard me talking to her husband on the step and quickly dropped into an innocent pose.
‘Nice to meet you,’ I say, shaking her hand. She smiles up at me – and the smile carries on way past the point at which I’d expect something else. It becomes a little unnerving.
‘Well – your pulse feels pretty regular to me,’ I say, writing down the figures. ‘It must have been what they call paroxysmal AF.’
‘Yes,’ she smiles. ‘It must have been.’

Behind me, dominating the room, is a gigantic fish tank. There’s a pump on the go, a few desultory bubbles, but nothing to any great effect. The water is a primordial, soupy green, almost completely opaque, with just a few splodges of rotting weed here and there to differentiate the gloom.
‘Nice tank,’ I say, then, struggling to back that up, add: ‘It’s relaxing, having bubbles.’
Mrs Moretz carries on smiling.
‘There aren’t any fish,’ says Mr Moretz, as if I thought there was the remotest chance there might be.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well – I suppose that’s the thing about aquariums. They’re a lot of work.’
‘You’re telling me,’ says Mr Moretz. ‘That’s why I keep the pump on.’
‘Why?’
‘It keeps the water moving. Cuts down on the slime.’

‘Please – call me Johnny’ he croaks, ‘And by the way, before you ask, yes, I am allergic to rubber. Hurr hurr hurr.’

He reminds me of those make your own creature flip-books you used to get, where each section is something different, a duck’s feet, a crocodile’s body, a giraffe’s head, and so on – except in Johnny’s case it’s the feet of Bernard Bresslaw, the body of Charles Hawtrey, the laugh of Sid James.

His bedroom is strangely bare except for a bed, a television, and a stack of CDs, hopeless old British smut, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Adventures of a Taxi Driver, On the Buses. On the wall to Johnny’s right is a full-sized colour poster of a naked woman, straddling a canoe or something. I’ve seen plenty of pornographic images in patients’ houses, of course. It’s mostly either elderly men with pictures of naked women, or elderly men with pictures of naked men. Sometimes it’s creepy, sometimes it’s poignant,  but suddenly and for the first time I’m struck by just how downright odd it is. It’s probably just the juxtaposition of the skeletal man on a bed beneath such a hack and potentiated version of the female form. The woman has one arm crooked behind her head, sleepily gazing down at the camera, the areola of her breasts as perfectly defined as the drops of sweat standing out on her shoulders, her other hand draped over her iliac crest, fingers resting against the upper line of that dark triangle of hair. There’s a tension in the composition, a power that starts between the sleepy twin points of the woman’s eyes, running down her body through the points of her breasts to the stark presentation of her pubic hair. And it’s this, particularly, this blatant presentation of the woman’s vagina – particularly in this context, this bare and rather cold little room, with Johnny lying on his bed, a few weeks from death, propped up on cushions, sipping tea through a Tommee Tippee beaker, that strikes me as acutely and profoundly odd. Because of course that’s where Johnny started. It’s where he came from. Not that particular vagina (although anything’s possible), but no doubt one very like. He was conceived and carried in a woman just like this (or close), and when the time was right, he rode those uterine contractions head down, eyes shut, arms and legs tucked in, a nude and grimacing alien, braced for impact, wrung out into the world.

‘Gorgeous, in’t she?’ says Johnny.
‘Yep. She’s pretty lovely.’
‘Oh yes. One hundred per cent woman,’ he says. And laughs. Hurr hurr hurr.

Terry Giger is down on all fours, where he fell in the living room half an hour ago. He can’t get himself up because of his size and his ill-health; the best he can do is sway a little from side to side, to relieve the pressure, and low, breathlessly, like a stricken animal.

His flat is cramped, cluttered, stifflingly hot. There’s a pool of urine spreading out from the tiny bathroom and across the hall; as I step across it I wish I’d thought to put my shoe-covers on, but there’s no time now. As soon as I’m at his side I can get to work. He hasn’t hurt himself, so it quickly becomes a matter of mechanics, one of angles and gravity, weight-bearing capacity, reserves of strength. He has sufficient power to hand-walk up a chair I hold steady in front of him. Then taking his weight as much as possible on his elbows, he cheats enough room to bring his right knee forward, planting enough of his right foot to push himself into a stand. As soon as he’s up, he topples over to the side onto the unmade bed beside him.
His breathing is awful; he’s clammy and pale.
‘Let’s get you sat up a bit,’ I say to him. The mattress is so squashy, and Terry so huge and exhausted,  even this simple manoeuvre becomes a major issue. But after a struggle, improvising with a bunch of cushions robbed from the sofa and a bunched-up duvet, I get him into a better position.

‘I’ve not met you before,’ I say, standing back and dabbing at my forehead with the back of my gloved hand, ‘…but you know what? I’m really not happy with how things are.’
‘Sorry about that,’ he says.
‘It’s not your fault. I just want to make sure you’re safe. And at the minute – I’m not convinced you are.
I take his pulse, feel it bounding away at his wrist.
‘I’m all right,’ he says. ‘Please don’t … call the ambulance.’
‘Well, look. Let me check you over and then we’ll see what’s what.’

Of course, it all points to the same thing. Infective exacerbation of COPD – not exactly headline news, given that’s what he was discharged with a couple of days ago. The question is, has it deteriorated to the point where he needs to go back in? And is he safe to be left alone?
‘My advice is to get an ambulance running,’ I tell him.
‘No. I’m not going.’
‘How are you going to manage when I go?’
‘I’ve got carers.’
‘How often?’
He holds up two fingers, then attempts a smile and says sorry because of the gesture.
‘So what’re you going to do in the meantime? You can hardly sit up, let alone make it to the toilet and back.’
I glance in the direction of the horror of his bathroom.
‘You’re really not safe,’ I say. ‘I can’t just leave you like this’
‘I don’t want … to go back… to hospital.’
Whilst I’m weighing up the options and thinking how best to change his mind, there’s a knock on the flat door.
‘Teeeerrrrry!’ and then ‘Jesus Christ, what a mess!’
A young woman struggles through, laden down with shopping bags. She’s tall and emphatic, her long hair scraped back in a comb, her startlingly blue eyes circled with kohl, tattoo gothic lettering running up and down either arm.
‘Whatcha been up to, Terence?’ she says. ‘Man! I go away for two weeks and I come back to this.’
I introduce myself, tell her what I found, how Terry is, how he needs to go to hospital, but won’t.
‘When you gotta go you gotta go,’ she says, dropping down onto the bed next to him and taking his hand. ‘Mate! Look at you! You’re proper sick and I don’t mean that in no good way. So you listen to what this guy’s tellin’ ya. And if you won’t listen to him, I tell you somefin’, you’re sure as hell gonna listen to me…’

The first time I go round to see Mr Supple there’s no reply. I do the usual things – knock a little louder, ring the landline, peer through the windows to see if he’s on the floor. In the notes it mentioned a keysafe, but I hadn’t been able to find it. It’s only by chance when I’m straightening up from peering through the letterbox that I finally notice it, tucked away behind a pillar. So I retrieve the key, open the door and let myself in.
I shout a couple of times as I close the door behind me – and suddenly someone appears at the top of the stairs to my left, a middle-aged man in boxer shorts and a faded t-shirt, both hands on the rails, staring down at me with a slack and hostile expression.
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I say. ‘My name’s Jim. I’m with the Rapid Response team, at the hospital. And I’ve come to see Mr Supple. To do his blood pressure and so on. And to take some blood.’
‘A phone call would’ve been nice.’
‘Yes. Sorry. It’s just – things are so manic first thing. If I stopped to ring everyone I was going to see, I’d probably still be in the office.’
‘He’s out.’
‘Oh! What – a hospital appointment or something?’
‘No. Out out. He’s gone to the beach.’
‘The beach?’
‘Yes. With my sister. A phone call could have told you that.’
‘Right. So – what time will he be back, d’you think?’
The man shrugs.
‘It’s a nice day,’ he says. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Tea time?’
‘Like I say – if you call first, you might find out.’
‘Okay. So what I’ll do, then – I’ll give you a call later on, and I’ll budget for a visit around five.’
The man stares down at me impassively.
‘Maybe I’ll see you then?’ I say, as brightly as I can.
‘Maybe,’ says the son. ‘Maybe not.’

I ring a few times in the early evening. Each time I get the answer machine, and each time I leave my number with a request for a call-back to let me know how things stand. In the end I decide to take pot-luck and go round anyway. He’s last on my late calls list, and on the way back to the hospital, so I figure what the hell.

Mr Supple Jnr answers the door. He’s still in his boxers, but at least he’s changed his t-shirt. He stares at me as I say hello and ask if his father’s back from the beach.
‘It’s someone for you, Dad,’ he says, relaxing his hold on the door, ‘Some bloodsucker from the hospital.’ And thrusting his hand down his boxers to re-arrange his testicles, he waddles through to the lounge and throws himself down on the sofa, sweeping up the remote control in one smooth move.

There’s a marked difference between them – and not just in terms of Mr Supple’s obvious senility. Mr Supple Snr is smartly tricked out in a two piece suit and sharply ironed shirt pinched at the cuffs with dark, Masonic cufflinks. I can’t imagine him dressed like this on the beach. But then again, maybe I can.
‘Hello!’ he says, his eyes a misty blue. ‘What do you want?’

Whilst I’m examining him, Supple Jnr is slumped on the sofa, flicking through the various sports channels they subscribe to. With each one he offers an expert piece of advice – what Lewis Hamilton did wrong; the problem with the Premier League; the trouble with the Masters.
‘Talking of golf,’ he says. ‘The last time you lot came round I was just teeing off at the ninth. One of you guys rang me up and I said Would you mind calling a little later? Only I’m playing golf and I’d like to just finish the round, please. He said something about having to go and get a file or something. I said whatever. And then about an hour later I was just about to putt a birdie when the phone goes again. I said to him What? I said,  Some of us are trying to play golf!  I mean – honestly! It’s like they think we don’t have a life of our own…’
‘I don’t know. I think it’s because anyone who gets referred to us is generally speaking in some distress – you know, pretty sick and vulnerable, and struggling at home…’
‘Well, I don’t get it,’ he says.
‘No. Nor me,’ I say. ‘Besides which, I did phone you this afternoon before I came and the phone went straight to voicemail.’
‘No it didn’t.’
‘I rang a few times.’
‘No you didn’t.’
He goes to the phone and jabs the button.
No new messages.
‘See?’
‘Well – I don’t understand that,’ I tell him.
‘No. Nor do I’
And keeping one eye firmly on me, he throws himself back down on the sofa, and turns up the volume.

Melanie’s front door is to the side of the building, down an alleyway so narrow you could put your back against one house, plant your feet against the other and shuffle your way to the top. I’m guessing the house is a couple of hundred years old. It must have been pretty grand once. Now it’s something of a housing horror, crudely divided into as many flats as could possibly fit, narrowing and contorting into smaller and smaller spaces until they ended up with rooms scarcely big enough to put in a door you could actually open. It all feels so extemporary, haphazard, fire-hazard. The builders must have been desperate, or crazy, or both.

‘Come in!’ says Melanie, retreating to make a Melanie-sized space big enough for me to enter. ‘And then turn to your left. I’m not using the right. It’s too damp.’

There’s no hall light, no windows, so I have to feel my way forwards, guided by the booming sound and flickering light of a giant TV screen in the living room.
‘I’ll turn it down,’ says Melanie, following behind. She must have been carrying the remote in her hand, because she shoots it over my shoulder.
‘There! That’s better!’
On the muted screen, two grim-faced men are standing on top of a burning rig, looking down into the water. There’s so much oil spilled everywhere even the sea’s on fire – but I guess they’re thinking at least there’s a chance they could swim underwater. There’s another explosion behind them, everything starts to collapse, they have to jump.
‘What on earth are you watching, Melanie?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember. Volcano or Earthquake or Monster something or other. It’s very busy, whatever it is.’
She takes a seat on the broken-down sofa she uses for a bed, puts the remote control to one side, and folds her hands in her lap. ‘Don’t worry about them,’ she says, as we both watch the two guys flailing around underwater. ‘They’ll be all right. They always are.’

Frank’s carer, Eloise, appears by my side at the front door so unexpectedly it makes me jump. I think she must’ve been watching from her window across the street, but then again, she’s such a thin and hyper-active woman, with such a mass of fine, frizzy black hair, I suppose it’s just possible she picked up the vibrations by other means, like a spider, dashing out at the smallest touch of the web.
‘He won’t want no hospital,’ she says, pushing open the door and hurrying inside. ‘He’s a stubborn old git, but I’m used to him.’
It’s a strangely bare little flat – nothing to it, just a kitchen counter, a bed, a commode, and then Frank himself, lying on his back on the bed, waving his arms around. It doesn’t take a stethoscope to figure out that he’s got a chest infection. When he coughs it’s like someone trying to crank start an old tractor.
‘Oof!’ says Eloise. ‘Let’s have it up, Frankie Baby!’ She jabs me in the ribs with the point of her elbow. ‘He likes it when I call him Frankie Baby. We go back a long ways. Don’t we, Frankie?’
He gapes and groans.
‘What’s that, Franks? You want some Williams? All right then. Here we go.’
On the kitchen counter there’s an old record player, and behind it, a stack of LPs. She flips through them and pulls out the one she wants – Andy Williams, in a tuxedo and sunglasses, tipping his head back to a bank of coloured lights.
‘C’mon Andy’ she says. ‘Cheer us all up, mate. We have a need.’
She crashes the record onto the player, and drops the needle halfway through Moon River.
‘Hark at that’ she says. ‘Lovely.’
‘I remember reading this thing about Andy Williams,’ I say, clipping a SATS probe to Frank’s finger.
‘Oh yes?’ says Claudie. ‘Som’ink about a murder?’
‘No. It was when he was starting out. He said he was so poor he used to eat dog food.’
‘Dog food?’
‘I know!’
‘I can’t imagine Andy Williams eating dog food.’
She picks up the record sleeve and studies it more closely.
‘He had such nice teeth.’

I’ve stopped outside to chat to Enid’s next door neighbour, Sam. He’s an extraordinary-looking man – craggy as an outcrop of granite, growl-voiced, huge hands. He reminds me of The Thing in The Fantastic Four, but retired now, packed into a rumpled suit and hat, given to walking with a stick.
‘It’s a terrible business,’ says Sam, ‘Terrible. Did you think it was cold in there?’
‘It was cold. I told her I thought she should turn the heating up, but she said she used to run a florist’s shop and she was used to it chilly. It kept the blooms fresh.’
‘Well it’s not keeping her fresh. If anything she’s gone downhill. You know she heats her water in a pan on the gas?’
‘I saw.’
‘How the house hasn’t burned down I don’t know…’
Whilst we’re talking, a brisk elderly woman dressed almost entirely in red heads straight towards us along the pavement.
‘Oh – watch out,’ says Sam. ‘Here’s Gladys.’
Before I can think much about that,  Gladys stops in front of us, points at me and says: ‘I know you.’
‘Do you?’
She stares at me.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she says.
‘I wish I could…’
She considers the problem, then points at me again.
‘Your wife’s name is Katherine and you have two girls, Martha and Jess.’
‘Wow! That’s amazing!’
‘You could go on the stage with that,’ says Sam.
‘…and your name…your name is something like Tim. No – Tom. No – John.’
‘Jim.’
‘Jim! That’s it! Jim! I knew I knew you.’
‘Well, well,’ says Sam. ‘Small world.’
‘I’m really sorry but I can’t seem to…’
‘Gladys,’ she says, holding out her hand. ‘I used to have lunch with your mother-in-law, Annette.’
‘Gladys!’ I say, shaking her hand even more warmly. ‘Curtain Gladys!’
‘Eh?’ says Sam. ‘That’s a new one.’
‘Gladys made Annette a pair of curtains once. Sorry, Gladys!  It’s been a while.’
‘And out of context!’ she says, brightly. ‘Now then – about poor Enid…’

I’m lost, but it’s not surprising. It’s the kind of estate you need a ball of string or a bag of bread crumbs to find your way around. Or an app. I’m sure I’ve passed that discarded fridge before. And yep  – here I am, back beneath the stark, anti-climb pole with the security camera spiked on top like a traitor’s head. No doubt there’s someone in a control room somewhere looking up from his copy of Empire magazine, (Superman edition), slowly taking his feet off the desk and saying What’s this fella think he’s playing at?

I ring the patient.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Julie. ‘Even the posties get lost.’
She gives me directions, along the lines of stand with your back to the big graffiti dog, walk due north about twenty paces… and so on, until five minutes later I’m standing at Julie’s back fence. It’s a high, dark structure with a serrated top. If you didn’t know it was there you’d never find it. A place so secretive and protected it reminds me of Robinson Crusoe’s stockade. I half expect to see a hand-tied ladder tentatively lowered over the side, but instead it seems that one of the panels is actually a gate, with a latch, and I let myself in.

Whilst the estate is characterised by tangled junk yards, discarded furniture, cars parked every angle, on every level surface, Julie’s back garden is a vision of Eden. Aromatic herbs perfectly arranged on raised beds; exotic plants lolling out of bright mosaic pots, a sweet ceramic stork peeking out from beneath a lush banana tree. The back door stands open, and Julie’s old sheepdog Juno comes out to see me. She angles her head as she looks up at me, then turns and guides me through the house to where Julie is waiting, breathing painfully, propped up on cushions.
‘Thanks for coming,’ she wheezes. ‘I know it’s not easy.’
Juno hops up onto the sofa opposite, and resumes her position – her head resting on her paws, her sad eyes fixed on her mistress.

Maureen’s hair is an art form, a talking point, a thing. A great, ribbed dome, a few singed curls escaping round the netting edges, the rest stuffed up into an immense, squashy, off-centre beehive actually filled with bees for all I know. I expect to see them start pouring out in a fury and circling their queen.

‘He’s in the lounge,’ she sniffs, holding the door open and standing aside with a murderously mournful expression, like the proprietor of a dodgy fairground exhibit showing the last punter round before she can lock up and retire to do her hair.

I go on into the sitting room to introduce myself to her husband, Stan; Maureen slams the door shut, slides the bolt to, then shuffles past me heading for the far side, taking care to reach up and stop her hair from slumping completely overboard, and then carefully climbing up onto what I’m guessing is her usual pew, a beaten up old kitchen stool over by the window. When the hair is balanced to her satisfaction, she crosses her legs, repositions her dressing gown, and then divides her attention between the quicks of her nails and my examination of her husband.
Stan is pleased to see me, though. He grips my hand firmly when I go to shake his, draping the other across for good measure, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth one happy, toothless chasm.
‘Stan!’ he says. ‘Call me Stan! Pleased to meet you!’
‘Put everything back when you’re done,’ says Maureen, the very second I move a cup. ‘There’s a black bag for rubbish in the kitchen. And don’t forget to sign the book.’