Russell's mother was seriously ill in intensive care.
The sneaking suspicion was that he should never have been away on holiday when she went in for her operation. At the back of his mind he'd known he was tempting fate, but who ever believed in that? Nevertheless, his one nagging thought, as he lay on hot, gritty beaches, dozing, was that something would inevitably go wrong if he took his vacation rather than cancelling. Because his mother's aneurysm operation was to be performed a mere twelve hours before the 757 deposited him back at the airport, it hardly seemed logical to miss out on two weeks in the sun. But guilt struck any form of rationality stone dead.
He rushed to the hospital dazed, in shock, wondering if the situation could have been avoided by treating himself to a bit of healthy selflessness. To keep lady luck sweet.
Before Russell was allowed in to see his mother, he was spoken to by the senior anaesthetist, having been required to sit for fifteen minutes in a small office adjacent to intensive care.
"The operation went without a hitch," he said without preamble. "The procedure is well established and usually straightforward. In fact, your mother was coming out of surgery as we expected when there were complications." The face of the anaesthetist was alarmingly boyish; Russell thought he looked too young to be responsible for life and death in the operating theatre.
Unable to maintain eye contact, Russell stared at the man's shoes. Unexpectedly, they were white leather mules with thick wooden soles, the sort of shoes which are supposed, somehow, to do your feet good. The leather was spotted with dried blood.
"Is she -?" Russell could not finish what he wanted to ask. He'd never had to face precisely this situation before. His father had died ten years ago, at work. His death was a fait accompli. Having his mother halfway between this world and the next was proving to be altogether more difficult to handle. He wished that his mother and father had not had him so late, then he wouldn't have had to cope with aged parents whilst he was still relatively young.
"Your mother is, what age?" the anaesthetist asked, as if deliberately trying to avoid answering the question he must have known Russell was trying to ask.