We follow him down another long corridor and up a flight of stairs. The walls are decorated differently on this ward. A brightly painted caterpillar stretches the whole length of one wall; a glade of painted toadstools adorns the nurses’ station.
“Have you been here before?” Chiu asks.
“No,” Farah says.
“This is my favourite place.” He frowns, then adds: “But it’s scary. You can’t stay long.”
There’s a Captain America mural in the waiting area and I can’t help wondering what can possibly be so scary about a children’s ward.
We stop outside a pair of double doors.
“You ready?” Chiu says.
“Kind of,” Farah replies.
Inside is a much larger room: about twice the size of the wards, with tables, chairs and bookcases on one wall and a small hatch where I guess they serve coffee and biscuits in the ordinary world. I don’t think I’ve been in this particular day room before, but I’ve spent enough time in enough other day rooms to recognize the vibe. They’ve made a real effort with this one: paintings, brightly coloured rugs, soft furnishings. My first thought is that I can’t understand why Chiu didn’t make this his camp instead of the library.
“Come on, let’s choose some games to take back with us,” Chiu says. He kneels in a little cordoned-off games area where there’s beanbags and a stack of games neatly arranged on IKEA shelves, and starts sifting through the boxes.
“Just don’t look at the windows,” he adds.
Farah and I can’t help ourselves. We look and we see immediately what he means. The day room has been carefully built into the corner of the building so two walls are entirely glass. In the ordinary world it would make it bright and cheery but here the view stretches over the surrounding area and it looks … wrong.
Insubstantial. Hazy. A lazy artist’s impression of a town that trembles like a reflection on the surface of a soap bubble, threatening to shatter at any moment.
It reminds me of the way a seizure feels: the fraught, edgy energy of postictal shock. Farah trembles next to me.
“What’s wrong with this place,” she breathes.
“Try not to think about it,” Chiu replies.
“It’s like it’s not finished,” I say.
Chiu sighs. “The outside is scary. Didn’t you figure that out yet? Why do you think I’m sleeping in a windowless library?” He gives us a withering look. “Now come and tell me what games you want.”
Farah’s hand finds mine and we help each other over to Chiu. The games section, at least, is somewhat shielded from the windows by a pillar and if I concentrate hard on the games it’s possible to not think about the outside for a moment.
“I want to get out of here,” Farah says, shakily.
“You need to choose a game first,” Chiu insists.
There’s a petulant, unwilling to be disappointed, edge to his voice. Farah reaches forward without really looking and snatches up Battleship. I spot a box of Uno and feel a small rush of genuine excitement. Before he died, Grandad and I used to play Uno all the time. I find the rhythmic back and forth of the cards peaceful, the pickups and the put-downs. There aren’t many choices in Uno; you just follow the rules and the cards go back and forth. I guess that’s why I like it.
We grab our stash and get out of there as quickly as we can.
“Should we take these back to the day room after we’re done?” I ask. “I don’t like the idea of the kids in the ordinary world not having a pack of Uno.”
Chiu shakes his head. “It doesn’t work that way,” he says. “I’ve tried it. If you go back in an hour or two there will be another Uno in the day room.”
“What?”
“It makes sense,” Farah says. “What we have here is the idea of Uno. A template. But it doesn’t matter where the idea of it is – the substance of it is in the ordinary world. It’s like Plato said: World of Form, World of Substance, all that.”
“Completely,” Chiu agrees.
“Of course,” I say, dubiously.
We play games all afternoon. Chiu is clearly delighted to have company again and he corners us with challenge after challenge. It’s fun at first. Chiu brims with energy and he makes it easy to forget (at least for a while) the tightly enclosed walls around us and the vast, awful nothingness beyond them.
I enjoy letting go, having an excuse to be childish. I make loud explosion noises and simulate the sound of distant screams when my battleship goes down. When I catch myself and glance self-consciously at Farah, I find that she’s smiling more fondly at me than I’d imagined she ever could. After that, we try to outdo each other with ever more blood-curdling sound effects. “I’m burning! I’m burning!” Farah squeals when her aircraft carrier is lost.
After four or maybe five Battleship tournaments I’ve had enough and Farah becomes quiet and slides away to browse the stacks of books.
“Chess?” Chiu suggests, tirelessly.
I concede to a game of chess. I used to think I was pretty good at chess, I played board two in the chess club at school for a while. But Chiu is something else. He’s fast and he doesn’t follow the usual patterns and moves they normally teach you. He plays like he’s taught himself, like he’s seen every game you could possibly play and he already knows the ending.
“How are you so good?” I say, admiringly.
“I was alone for a long time,” Chiu reminds me. “I played with myself a lot.”
Farah glances over to us. “We guessed. But how are you so good at chess?”
It starts to feel like evening. We can’t be sure without hunger or thirst or daylight, but after a brief discussion we agree that it’s at least late afternoon. Who knows what time it is in the ordinary world? I imagine myself lying in the street still, caught in a blinding neurological flashbulb white-out, while living this – all this – in that same instant.
Uno, we all conclude, is our favourite. We slip into a kind of waking dream, watching the cards move backwards and forward. Each with its colour and its number, trying to match another colour or number. And the wildcards – plus-four, reverse, swap – they’re like bumps in the road, unexpected twists that can upend a game without warning. Farah and Chiu are fiercely competitive. When Farah switches the colour to red, I know it’s because she’s been watching Chiu’s moves and knows that it’s the only colour he doesn’t have. When Chiu plays a reverse, I’m sure he’s done it only to ensure that he can hit me with a plus-four before I can get rid of my final card.
But I still win every hand.
