Free The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale

and Westminster job too and the format was drearily familiar. A drugs company laid on a spread of sandwiches, fruit and chocolate bars in exchange for the chance to promote the virtues of new or infinitesimally improved products, to answer questions and to dole out samples and promotional freebies rarely more tempting than pens, notepads and the very occasional tee shirt. Both the GUM clinic and the HIV one were under constant pressure from the hospital’s management to keep within budget and were obliged to seek best value for money at every turn so these grim little sessions were a necessary evil. Ben had learnt that the trick was to pile his plate with lunch, sit at the back, ask one question to ensure hispresence had registered then sink into a state of restorative torpor such as he hadn’t enjoyed since school divinity lessons.
    Today he could neither relax as he would like nor concentrate for once on the drug reps’ presentations. He ate his sandwiches and gulped his lukewarm apple juice but found he could not forget it was a Friday. Laura would be calling in to drop her mother off at the geriatric clinic.
    Chloë always said he had a lousy memory, and he played along with her image of him as the absent-minded boffin who forgot his own birthday, because it suited him and marital acquiescence was easier than trying to change her opinion. Secretly he had always believed his memory was a useful mental sieve, sifting out the things that mattered – phone numbers, pin numbers, the Latin names of viruses and pseudo-Greek ones of drugs. His memory discarded dinner-party conversations even as they were unspooling around him, and he was ruthless, despite his best efforts, at refusing to store the names and even faces of people he didn’t respect or simply hoped never to meet again. But he had always thought his ability to recollect events was better than average and liked to think he would make a useful eyewitness in a court case.
    In the weeks after they rediscovered each other, Laura laid waste this idea he had of himself. With quiet ruthlessness, she brought him to see that what he thought of as the historical truth of their shared history was only aversion, a narrative he had unconsciously shaped to cause the least pain for others and least blame for himself.
    He did not recognize her immediately – twenty years had passed and they were in a hospital corridor, after all, not a reunion in college, so he was not looking for old faces. He emerged from a crowded lift and she was standing several yards away. She had caught something – a piece of gravel perhaps – in her shoe and was balancing on one foot while she lifted the other behind her and twisted around to free her heel of its irritation. He didn’t normally notice clothes – not such a strong eyewitness after all, perhaps – but he remembered her sleeveless dress was simple and fairly short, the colour of a favourite pair of suede shoes Chloë had forcibly retired and not let him replace, a brown somewhere between bread crust and butterscotch. It was either very well cut or she had an excellent figure; without her inside it would surely have looked like a sack. Her arms and legs were lightly tanned and her short hair hung across her face as she arched backwards. She was anonymous and elegant, and elegance in a busy general hospital was as unexpected as dancing.
    Then she stood upright again, glanced at her watch and looked about her, looking straight through him, with a hot, cross expression on her face, and he was sure it was her, even with the shorter, discreetly coloured hair. She took a step or two away from him then stopped andrepeated the gesture because whatever was wrong in her shoe was still not right, and he looked again at her heel and flexing calf muscle and out of nowhere had a vivid recollection of how it felt when she pressed the sole of her foot into the much bigger sole of his as they lay end to end on a sofa and laughed and said, ‘I can