‘Must have been nice and hot over there,’ said his wife.

‘You can say that again.’

‘Did you get seasick at all?’

‘Oh, no. I was too busy for that.’ There had been nightly lectures on the ship, she added, like the one given by a professor on Greek mythology. Zeus. The nine Muses. The Minotaur. Very informative.

Vaughan was content to leave the conversation to the two women. It was pleasant to listen to his mother’s still-strong voice, her whole being seeming to shout with her usual vitality. But then it occurred to him that his mother was repeating herself, which was unlike her. She was back to the exact same stories about the village.

‘Sorry, but we have to be getting back,’ he interrupted.

Only some while after that, on another day over in Norfolk, did it become clear to Vaughan that there was something very wrong with his mother. She’d made no fuss then when he went to the kitchen for the crockery and milk. When he opened the fridge door, he saw that the milk wasn’t there. The shelves for the cheese and butter, the ones for meat or fish, and the bottom drawer for the fruit and vegetables, were also empty.

He’d flown to Canada by the time the results of his mother’s neurological exams came back. The dreaded ‘A’ word. The next time he had seen her in Norfolk she was living in residential care. He’d flown over on his own, on one of those packed flights that made his temples throb. What a relief, then, arriving at the home, to discover the converted Georgian mansion that housed it, majestic calm in stone form and set in acres of parkland.

Shown around by a member of staff, he went to the large, light-giving windows. The country views, he thought, would have recommended the place to his older brother who had chosen the home.

Their mother’s room was situated at the rear, in a separate wing built of brick for the residents with dementia. The voice of Vera Lynn – forever the voice of a bright young up-and-comer – carried down the corridors. Along the walls, old posters of Cunard cruises to New York invited reverie and reminiscence. On this and every visit that followed to this wing, Vaughan would step out of 1999 (or 2003 or 2007, the final time) and into the forties.

The forties had coincided with his mother’s youth, her early years as a wife and mother, and hearing the period’s songs, viewing its posters, helped to revive her. Momentarily, she recovered possession of her confidence, her old ease surfaced. She might respond sensibly to some remark and move around with renewed grace. But, always, Vaughan noticed beneath the grace the tremendous effort, and he saw himself in that effort. The minute after, that ease – and with it the mother he had always known – would be gone.

The final time he had sat with her, she was ninety years old and she was nine years old. She was talking to him in the incomprehensible Welsh she’d used with her parents in Swansea. From the reclining chair in her room, his mother was telling him something breathily – an unabating singsong, deferential. He realised then that he was her father – she was addressing her father. How he wished he could understand her.

A hand on her lap grew agitated and he reached over and squeezed the plump cushion of her palm in reassurance. He was searching his mind for the only Welsh he had, words he’d taught himself for this moment.

Dwi’n caru ti.

I love you.

✲

A few days ago a calendar reminded Vaughan of his forthcoming retirement. He hadn’t needed any reminding but there it was in black and white: 26 June 2024. Fifty years. Half a century to the day since he’d graduated with his Edinburgh medical degree.

He’d always enjoyed looking ahead, not only days or weeks but into the following year, looking ahead and seeing all the lined-up events that promised to keep his life full and bustling. Whereas spring 2023 had yet to reach Calgary (still treadmill weather here in April), already in his mind he was halfway into 2024.

His operating days were not over just yet, he thought. He was good for one more year at the hospital. His body in shape, fit enough to run marathons and compete internationally in duathlons. They helped to clear his head.

Today was Monday. Vaughan was up by 4 a.m., as was his habit. The writing of case reports monopolised his early mornings, after which he got into his office by eight. Monday was consultations day. These consultations involved new patients and for this reason tended to overrun. Vaughan liked to take his time with each patient, to inspect every part, each nook and cranny of a person’s medical history. To leave no stone unturned.

Patients, he knew from experience, rarely volunteered the most useful information about their illnesses. It took Vaughan’s probing questions to gently winkle these details out of them. No, they did not experience any wrist pain. Yes, they sometimes felt a stiffness in the small joints. Yes, the stiffness was worse in the morning. No, they were not diabetic. Then he would inspect their fingers and close his own around a pen and fill in the long form in their file with the necessary particulars.

They were like anyone else, the men and women who came each Monday into his office, never thinking about their hands until compelled by illness or accident. All those years during which they mistook a phone’s rising to the ear and a jar’s unscrewing and a hardcover’s page-turning for natural events, then a strange twinge or a sudden ache would make the book a brick, the jar a safe, the phone a wet bar of soap.

What kind of pain, Vaughan would want to know. But the deep intimacy of their pain made his patients inarticulate. Often they could only compare it to another kind. Like a toothache, one man might say. Like a raging toothache, but in the knuckles.

For some patients, the next step would be a splint, or hand rehabilitation exercises. For others, further examinations – a scan or blood test. Occasionally, Vaughan undid a misdiagnosis – recognising personal variations on an anatomical feature as normal and only simulating disease.

After another long Monday in his office, in his thoughts Vaughan returned to the summer of 2024. His near-future retirement. Perhaps he would travel to Llangattock, his birthplace, to mark the occasion. He could see himself doing that. He imagined himself walking down the brow of the hill to join a guide and explore the caves beneath, the labyrinthine passageways, among Europe’s most extensive. Relentlessly he would grapple through them, tackling their elusive twists and confounding turns, feeling his way along the calcite walls in the semi-dark as spelunkers do. He would not falter. He would feel like he had been here many times before.

Kana

Dear Ms Seiko Noda, Minister of Loneliness. So began the letter Kana had spent several days writing in her head (horizontally, and left to right, the letter being in English, the language she preferred to think in) and continued, after the necessary preliminaries:

I applaud your ministry’s recent creation and its aim to tackle the spiralling problem of loneliness in the country.

On the government’s website, I notice that it does not mention who might be more vulnerable to loneliness. Research has shown that ‘disabled’ people can be lonelier than ‘non-disabled’, autistic people particularly so. Autistic people do not ‘have a disability’, but they are ‘disabled’ when others around them do not understand their differently wired minds nor accommodate for their needs. Making accommodations confers on them no additional merits, but simply permits them to be on a level playing field with everyone else.

A lack of understanding from others leads to loneliness, just as much as the absence of social relationships. Addressing this would go a long way towards alleviating loneliness in the nation. This could include diminishing the stigma around autism in Japan andbringing the correct knowledge of autism and autistic loneliness to the wider society …

✲

Where was she now? Nowhere. In the no-woman’s land between sleep and waking. She opened her eyes, looked up at the ceiling, down at Sky. No, wait, that was impossible. Sky was in heaven. She closed tight and then opened her eyes again, and saw Levi. The schnauzer puppy wagged her white tail as Kana hauled herself out of bed.

As always, she was up with the first pink of dawn and the city’s sparrows she heard from her window as they balanced on the telephone wires, chirping. As she looked out, she remembered that in her dream she’d been a mouse, a dancing mouse in a circus. She recalled distinctly her scurrying to reach the mouse troupe from which she had been separated for some unknown reason. Scurrying, her mouse’s heart hammering, because the troupe would be waiting to start. They would not start their dancing without her.

Slippers padded along the corridor, a soft tap at the door preceded its opening, and her mother smiled into the bedroom.

‘The tea’s ready,’ Hiromi said.

Despite her time in America, and many months in Britain, Kana still took her tea green. No milk or sugar.

On her way to the kitchen she passed through the living room. Long and wide as six tatami mats, the room seemed more spacious since she and Hiromi had finished packing most of their belongings into boxes. It was September 2021, and they were leaving the mainland and their home of thirty years, Utsunomiya, for Okinawa. They were moving to an apartment near the American Village and the harbour and counting down the days until their departure. They would take a taxi to the airport, saying a last goodbye to the paddies, cornfields and orchards, whose changes rang in the seasons. Farewell to the mountain views and the smell of cows through the car windows as they drove.

Thirty years of life slimmed down to a dozen or so boxes. Hiromi was a single parent, Kana an only child. There was hardly anything, or anyone, to keep them here. Kana’s father, who had left their lives years ago, was helping to pay for the move. Her mother, a make-up artist turned aesthetician, would find new clients on the island.

The two women sat down to breakfast: bagels, for Kana, and amazaki, a fermented rice drink, for Hiromi. They hadn’t yet packed away their chairs and table.

‘A writer contacted me the other day about a book he’s working on,’ said Kana. ‘A British man living in Paris.’ She was familiar with his work. She gave his name in Japanese for her mother’s benefit: Danieru Tametto.

What sort of books had this Tametto-san written, Hiromi was curious to know, and why was he contacting her. ‘Is it something to do with your research?’

Kana flushed; she nodded. ‘Research’ was the kind of word that sounded fine when she said it but pretentious when others did. She was twenty-seven years old, and while she felt strongly about her work, she was the last person who would ever make a fuss about it. Which was why the enquiries from this British writer, like those from the American reporter before him, had been as big a surprise to her as they were to her mother. A reassurance, too, that she really might be on to something.

She was a researcher in loneliness. She measured and dissected it with considerable zeal, even passion, because it was a young field of research, fast-expanding, increasingly vital, and also because she had often known first-hand the ache of feeling alone. If anyone – the British writer or the American reporter or someone else – were to ask her how she measured a thing like loneliness, she could answer: the same way you measure the wind. By its observable effects on our world. You could identify and grade the various forms of loneliness, just like we identify and grade a dozen kinds of wind – running from light air and fresh breeze to gale and hurricane.

‘0’ – Contentment – being wholly at ease in the world

…

‘3’ – Mild isolation – aloneness is noticed regularly, living and work spaces seem excessively large

‘4’ – Moderate isolation – aloneness is unpleasant like body odour, days feel very long

…

‘6’ – Estrangement – sense of not belonging, being unlike others, connection is difficult

…