'Because it is true.'

'Of course it is true. But what does it matter if it is true? Surely it is not up to me to play God, separating the sheep from the goats, dismissing the false stories, preserving the true. If I have a model, it is not God, it is the Abbe of Citeaux, the notorious one, the Frenchman, the one who said to the soldiers in his pastoral care, Slay them all – God will know who are His.

'No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.'

She pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. Is it his turn? He has nothing more to say. If truth and lies are the same, then speech and silence may as well be the same too.

'Do you notice, Paul,' she resumes, 'how conversations between you and me keep falling into the same pattern? For a while all goes swimmingly. Then I say something you don't want to hear, and at once you clam up or storm off or ask me to leave. Can't we get beyond such histrionics? We don't have much time left, either of us.'

'Don't we.'

'No. Under the gaze of heaven, in the cold eye of God, we don't.'

'Is that the truth. Go on.'

'Do you think I find this existence any less hard than you? Do you think I want to sleep outdoors, under a bush in the park, among the winos, and do my ablutions in the River Torrens? You are not blind. You can see how I am declining.'

He gives her a hard stare. 'You are making up stories. You are a prosperous professional woman, you are as comfortably off as I am, there is no need for you to sleep under bushes.'

'That may be so, Paul. I may be exaggerating a little, but it is an apt story, apt to my condition. As I try to impress on you, our days are numbered, mine and yours, yet here I am, killing time, being killed by time, waiting – waiting for you.'

He shakes his head helplessly. 'I don't know what you want,' he says.

'Push!' she says.

ON THE HALL table, a scrawled note: 'BYE BYE MR RAYMENT. I'VE LEFT SOME STUFF, I'LL PICK IT UP TOMORROW. THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, DRAGO. PS PHOTOGRAPHS ALL IN ORDER.'

The 'stuff' Drago refers to turns out to be a garbage bag full of clothing, to which he adds a pair of underpants he finds among the bedclothes. Otherwise no trace of the Jokics, mother or son. They come, they go, they do not explain themselves: he had better get used to it.

Yet what a relief to be by himself again! One thing to live with a woman; quite another to share one's home with an untidy and imperfectly considerate young man. Always tension, always unease when two males occupy the same territory.

He spends the afternoon tidying his study, putting things where they used to be; then he takes a shower. In the shower he by accident drops the flask of shampoo. As he bends to pick it up, the Zimmer frame, which he always brings into the cubicle with him, slips sideways. He loses his footing and falls, slamming his head against the wall.

Let nothing be broken: that is his first prayer. Tangled in the frame, he tries to move his limbs. A flicker of exquisite pain runs from his back down his good leg. He takes a slow, deep breath. Be calm, he tells himself. A slip in the bathroom, nothing to be alarmed about, it happens to many people, all may yet be well. Plenty of time to think, plenty of time to set things right.

Setting things right (he tries to be calm and clear) will mean, one, disengaging himself from the frame; two, manoeuvring himself out of the cubicle; then, three, assessing what he has done to his back; and, four, proceeding to whatever comes next.

The problem lies between one and two. He cannot disengage himself from the Zimmer frame without sitting up; and he cannot sit up without a gasp of pain.

No one bothered to inform him, and he did not think to ask, who the Zimmer is or was who has come to play such a role in his life. For his own convenience he has imagined Zimmer as a thin-faced, tight-lipped figure of a man, dressed in the high collar and stock of the 1830s. Johann August Zimmer, son of Austrian peasants, determined to escape the drudgery of the family farm, toils by candlelight over his anatomy books while in the byre behind the house the milch-cow moans in her sleep. After scraping through his examinations (he is not a gifted student), he finds a posting as an army surgeon. The next twenty yean he spends dressing wounds and cutting off limbs in the name of His Serene Imperial Majesty Carl Joseph August, nicknamed The Good. Then he retires from the service and after several wrong turns lands up at Bad Schwanensee, one of the lesser spas in Bohemia, prescribing for gentlewomen with arthritis. There he has the brainwave of adapting for the more frail among his patients the apparatus that back in Carinthia has for centuries been used to teach children to walk, thereby earning for himself a modest immortality.

Now here he is on the tiled floor, naked, immobile, with Zimmer's invention on top of him blocking the cubicle door, while water continues to pour down and leaking shampoo rises in a froth all around and the stump, which has taken a knock on its tender end, begins to throb with its own, unique variety of pain. What a mess! he thinks. Thank God Drago does not have to witness it! And thank God the Costello woman is not here to make jokes!

There are drawbacks, however, to having neither Drago nor the Costello woman nor anyone else within calling distance. One is that, as the supply of warm water runs out, he finds himself being douched with cold. The controls are beyond his reach. He is certainly free to lie here all night without risk of being laughed at; but by dawn he will have frozen to death.

It takes him a full thirty minutes to escape the prison he has made for himself. Unable to lift himself, unable to push Zimmer's frame out of the way, he finally grits his teeth and forces the door of the cubicle back until the hinges snap.

All shame is gone by now. He crawls across the floor to the telephone, calls Marijana's number, gets a child's voice. 'Mrs Jokic, please,' he says through chattering teeth; and then, 'Marijana, I have had an accident. I am OK but can you come at once?'

'What is accident?'

'I had a fall. I have done something to my back. I can't move.'

'I come.'

He drags the bedclothes down and huddles under them, but he cannot get warm. Not only his hands and foot, not only his scalp and his nose, but his very belly and heart are gripped with cold; spasms overtake him during which he grows too rigid even to shiver. He yawns until he is light-headed with yawning. Old blood, cold blood: the words drum in his brain. Not enough heat in the veins.

He has a vision of himself hung by the ankles in a cold chamber amid a forest of frozen carcases. Not by fire but by ice.

He falls into some kind of slumber. Then suddenly Marijana is bending over him. He tries to form his frozen lips into a smile, into words. 'My back,' he croaks. 'Careful.' No need, thank God, to explain how it happened. How it happened must be all too clear from the chaos in the bathroom, the hiss of the cold shower.

There is no tea left, but Marijana makes coffee, puts a pill between his lips, helps him to drink, then with surprising strength raises him bodily from the floor onto the bed. 'You get scare, eh?' she says. 'Now maybe you stop this shower business all alone.'

He nods obediently, closes his eyes. Under the ministrations of this excellent woman and superlative nurse, he can feel the ice within him begin to thaw. No bones broken, no being reprimanded by Mrs Putts, no being laughed at by Mrs Costello. Instead, the soothing presence of an angel who has put aside all else to come to his aid.

No doubt for an ageing cripple the future holds further mishaps, further falls, further humiliating calls for help. What he needs at this moment, however, is not that dismaying and depressing prospect but this soft, consoling, and eminently feminine presence. There, there, be calm, it is all over: that is what he wants to hear. Also: I will stay by your side while you sleep.