'That's not a word Delia'.

'What? Of course it's a word! And it's a word on a triple word score no less. Don't be a sore loser now Pats. You won the last two games but your lucky streak was bound to end eventually'.

Delia flashed Patsy a grin over the scrabble board to show she was only teasing and put a hand out hopefully in the direction of the bag of tiles.

'But what on Earth does it MEAN? I'm sure there isn't a single word in the English language that contains two V's, a Q and no vowels'.

'It's Welsh. Welsh is different with vowels'.

Patsy tried to look stern to make it clear that she wasn't buying it - even if Welsh words WERE allowed in scrabble she was fairly sure it was Ls and Ws they seemed to have too many of, not Vs and Qs. Somehow though the frown wouldn't quite stay in place and she felt a traitorous corner of her mouth lifting into a small smile as she struggled not to laugh. Delia had always tried to brazenly cheat like this when they had played together before the accident too. Usually she didn't let her get away with it (well not often… at least not when the cheating was THIS blatant), but it was so nice to see Delia relaxing enough with her to try such acts of mischief that instead of firmly handing back the tiles with an admonishment to play properly, she said only:

'Tell you what, since the dictionary seems to have mysteriously vanished ever since you discovered this scrabble board, if you can pronounce it and define it, I'll allow it'.

Patsy noticed Delia blush a little and squirm on her cushion, under which (Patsy was fairly certain) the missing dictionary was concealed.

'Alright… it's pronounced… it's pronounced… ah… nadolig llawen. And it means… Well there isn't a proper word for it in English, but it means that pleasant bubbly feeling you get when you know you're going to win'.

Patsy actually did laugh then, a real belly laugh that surprised her with its volume. Delia was a total scoundrel, but she was delighted to hear her saying something that really DID sound Welsh. Was she remembering something? There was no point asking what it actually meant now of course - Delia was tenacious in keeping up the threads of her tall tales when she was in the middle of them, but she made a mental note to ask whether 'nadolig llawen' really was Welsh and what it meant after the game.

'I could point out that what you've put doesn't even begin with N-'

'That combination of P and um… double V… always makes an N sound in-'

'I could point that out, but I won't. I also won't point out that what you said has too many syllables for that number of letters, OR that Welsh words are absolutely not allowed in English scrabble. But… Go on, add up the points. I warn you though, you've set a precedent now. If I lapse into French or Latin you're not allowed to say a word of complaint'.

'You speak Latin?'

Patsy gave a little grimace 'Catholic boarding school. Latin rather comes with the territory I'm afraid'.

'Really? Will you tell me what it was like? Oh go on Pats, I want to know more about you'.

Patsy resisted the urge to bite her lip nervously. It was true that talking about school would be harmless enough, but it could so easily lead on to other, more painful questions…

She looked at Delia's suddenly shining eyes and hopeful expression.
This wasn't a big deal. She had told her all this before after all, and it had been fine. Good, even. There was no reason it would be any different now. It was still Delia.

'There isn't much to tell really… It wasn't nearly as jolly as 'The twins at St Clare's' led me to believe it would be. Just imagine my youthful dismay on discovering that the Sisters actually enforced such rules as 'no being out of bed after lights out' so all the midnight feasts I had been expecting were thwarted before they started! We weren't even allowed to get up to use the bathroom by some of the more rigorous rule keepers among them. But once I was over that disappointment I got along alright. I played a lot of sports, learned the difference between a Sister and a Nun and did enough penance that I feel certain I must be covered for any and all future misdemeanours, if anyone really is keeping note of such things'.

'So you didn't have any midnight feasts at all? Not in the whole time you were at school there?'

'Not even one'.

'How disappointing'.

Patsy gave a lopsided grin.

'Not entirely. Midnight was no good, the Sisters made their rounds on the hour. The best time for secret night time adventures was between 2.15 and 3.45 in the morning. The last dorm check was at 2am, then the Sisters were up at 4.15, so until 3.45 you could be fairly sure they would be asleep. We trained ourselves so well that it was months before I stopped waking up at 2.15 on the dot in the Nurses' Home…'

Patsy trailed off, remembering the first time she had told Delia this story. They had both been living at the Nurses' Home then, and when Delia had learned that Patsy still woke up at that time almost every night she had begged her to sneak in to her room and wake her for a late night feast. It had been the first of many precious stolen hours and a half. Much later, after they had admitted their feelings for each other, those late night meetings had been the only time they had really got to spend together without the facades, not worrying that someone was about to walk in or overhear their whispered conversations.

Just as she had the first time, Delia seemed charmed by the story.

'Do you still wake up at 2.15, ever?'

Patsy looked away. Her nightmares still plagued her nightly even now Delia was home, but although she half-woke from them frequently, she never looked at the clock anymore.

'No. Not for a while'.

She had expected more questions – a request for a 2.15 feast story perhaps, or even to know the difference between a Catholic Sister and a Catholic Nun (Sisters worked in the community, Nuns stayed cloistered in their convents to pray), but Delia seemed to have noticed the shift in Patsy's mood and made no further comment. Instead she flashed her old cheeky grin as she reached for the pencil stub they were using to note down the scores.

'Well Patience Mount, you're full of surprises. Who'd have thought I was about to beat a woman who speaks Latin at scrabble?'

'The game isn't over yet Deels'.

'Are you sure? Look, that's 27, but P is on a double letter so 30, then triple word score makes it 90! And gives me a nice lead of 56 points…I don't think it would be too presumptuous of me to open up a celebratory packet of pink wafers at this point'.

Delia dimpled at her hopefully and Patsy gave her another mock stern frown, though in reality she was grateful for her friend's sensitivity, and quietly impressed with the speed with which Delia had worked out the score. She was improving.
That was half the reason they played games like this – it helped ease the boredom of the bed rest of course (which was really reclining chair rest, because Patsy couldn't confine Delia to the bedroom like a naughty child), but it also helped her retrain her mind to focus enough to come up with the words and perform the calculations required for scoring, as well as maintain the attention span to see the game through to the end.

Patsy looked back at her own letters. It seemed she had all of the vowels Delia had been lacking for her last word. What on Earth could she make with A-A-U-I-I-I-R?

Delia seemed to sense her hesitation and paused in her selection of new tiles to say

'You could always use a… hm… a less conventional word if you wanted Pats, like I did. To be honest I think it's more fun playing scrabble that way anyway. We came up with some wonderful words when I used to play with my cousins. We practically developed our own secret language from it, eventually. The rule was the word had to look as though it might be real, and you needed to be able to keep a straight face while you gave some sort of convincing definition, but if it turned out to actually be something we could find in the dictionary you didn't get the points for it. Uncle Dan didn't half get cross when he found out the reason we were chattering away in nonsense words. He'd bought the scrabble so we could improve our spelling and vocabulary you see, and there we were doing the opposite. You should have heard him yell Pats, you'd have thought we'd been throwing nain's china off the roof the way he carried on'.

Delia was smiling with a distant look on her face, seeming not to have noticed the fact that she had just described a concrete memory from her past in more detail than she had been able to do with anything so far. Maybe hearing a bit about Patsy's history had nudged something in Delia's brain to bring out more of her own? Patsy suppressed the urge to jump up and hug her in excitement, attempting to force a casual tone as she replied; trying to tease out as much of the recollection as she could without startling Delia out of it all together.

'Did you start playing properly after that?'

'No… We just waited until he went back down stairs and then defined 'hadwyk' as the odd purplish colour the tip of his nose went when he shouted. I suppose we were very naughty really'.

'It sounds like you and your cousins were close… did you spend a lot of time with them when you were growing up?'

Patsy wondered where the cousins were now, and why none of them - or even the aunt and uncle - had come forward after the accident to claim Delia. She was incredibly grateful to be able to care for her herself, but for the first time the beginnings of doubt were creeping into her mind. Delia was remembering these people, but she couldn't remember Patsy. Would she feel safer, happier, less lost, if she was in their company instead of hers? Was she just being selfish not to be even trying to track them down, simply because she wanted Delia here with her? Before the accident she had no doubt about where Delia would want to be, but now? Now she wasn't so sure…

Delia was doodling on the corner of the scoring sheet as she answered, little stick figures taking shape beneath her pencil. A boy with freckles and hair sticking every which way. A girl with careful plaits reaching nearly halfway down her triangle of skirt. Another with a thick fringe and pigtails tied with ribbon…

'Quite often, when we were small. Once or twice a week I suppose. And Rhys was at the same junior school as me, so I suppose I saw him quite a bit then…'

The distant, dreamy look was clouding over into a frown as Delia concentrated on the frayed threads of memory, the pencil beginning to press down harder on the page as she struggled to get it right.

'No, that was a girls' school. It can't have been Rhys, it must have been Dilys… But I don't think it was. I could have sworn I remembered… '

The pencil lead snapped suddenly from the pressure Delia had been putting into her drawing and she gave herself a little shake, as if waking from a half doze. Patsy recognised the movement as an indication that reminiscing was getting too confusing and giving Delia a headache. There would be nothing to be gained from pushing her any further. The memories would come in their own time. She returned quickly to the scrabble board, hoping to distract Delia before she grew too distressed by her inability to remember properly.

'Alright, how about aioniriu? It means the sensation of attempting to scratch an itchy tongue with one's teeth'.

It seemed to have worked. Delia gave a delighted little laugh and threw a cushion at Patsy.

'Oh come on Pats. Itchy tongue? Nobody gets an itchy tongue!'

Patsy threw the cushion back, pretending to be affronted.

'Just because you have been fortunate enough not to experience it, it doesn't mean everyone else is so lucky!'

'Alright alright, but it's only 8 points. Oh no sorry, nine, the O's on a double letter. Still not ever so impressive!'

'You're forgetting the extra 50 for using up all my letters. 59 points, which means I am 3 ahead of you… and there's only four tiles left in the bag! I might beat you yet'.

Delia pouted a little as she retrieved the spare pencil from the box to note down Patsy's score.

'Oh no you don't Patience Mount. I'm beating you this time if I have to sit up until midnight to figure out how. Although I suppose this is my own fault really. That's what I get for trying to be fair in my chea- erm, my… creative use of the rules'.

In the end Delia finished two points ahead of Patsy with only minimal further cheating and jumped up to do an impromptu little tap dance around the table in triumph.

'Victory! I'm going to fetch my memory book, we need to document this moment so I won't forget the first time I beat you since I broke my brain'.

She seemed to have entirely forgotten that she was supposed to be an invalid on bed rest, and thankfully, to have forgotten her moment of discomfort over her cousins.

The score sheet had fluttered to the ground when Delia leapt up to celebrate and Patsy couldn't help noticing that the doodle of Delia and her cousins was now scored through with a thick, dark line, their happy smiles almost entirely obliterated. Was it caused by the random jerk of the pencil when she had put too much pressure on it? Or was there something more behind the action? A subconscious memory of how she had lost touch with these childhood playmates perhaps?

Until she knew whether the parting had been amicable she didn't want to put too much energy into tracking these people down. What if there had been a family feud Delia had never mentioned? She might not want to see them again. They might not want to see her…

All the same, Patsy was growing more convinced by the hour that Delia needed more people in her life who had known and cared about her before the accident. Maybe the people she remembered so far weren't around, but Delia was popular and well liked here, and she didn't know it. For all she knew, Patsy was her only friend. That wasn't fair.

By the time Delia returned, her book newly updated and her cheeks still slightly flushed with pleasure at her triumph; Patsy was ready with a pen and her address book.

'Are you up for a bit more writing Deels? I think its time I told you more about your other friends'.

Delia's grin faded slowly into a more serious expression as she looked down at the book in her hands.

'I did wonder about others when I was reading what you'd put. I know I could have asked, but I didn't like to...'

'Why ever not? You know I'm happy to answer as much as I can, I wouldn't have minded'.

'It wasn't that... it was... well... what if I didn't like the answer? What if it had turned out that you were my only friend? I don't remember having any other visitors in the hospital after all. I know I was on a lot of medication, and it was ages before my short term memory was good enough to even remember you properly from day to day, but there was at least a week when I'd have remembered. Maybe more...'

Patsy hedged a little. Delia was giving her such a hopeful look, as if she might be able to explain it all away – to say her friends had tried to see her every day, but weren't allowed, or that they'd all coincidentally been on a month long cruise when the accident happened. Anything that would mean she hadn't been abandoned when she most needed someone.

As far as Patsy knew, none of the others had been to visit Delia in their own time, but then again...

'They're mostly girls you knew from nursing at the London. I expect when you saw them they'd have been in uniform. You might not have known them as friends rather than just more nurses'.

'I never thought of that! I suppose I should have, since I knew I once worked there... All that time, I might have been surrounded by my best friends without knowing it'.

Delia seemed unable to decide whether she found that idea comforting or disturbing, reflexively gripping her book a little tighter as she thought about it. Patsy had noticed that most of the time Delia didn't seem to need her memory book anymore – she still had to concentrate to remember small details, but her short term memory was good enough that she could keep hold of the important things without having to refer to what was written in it. At times like this though, when she felt conflicted or anxious, she would often return to her hospital habit of keeping the book close by; as if it were an anchor that could stop her getting lost in the turbulent sea of her own confused memories. By the time she spoke again she was hugging the book against her chest, her eyes gazing at a point over Patsy's left shoulder as she concentrated on her hazy recollection of the hospital.

'I don't remember much about the nurses that were looking after me. They all seem to blur into one generic purple uniformed woman in my head. But... I do remember that none of them seemed to like me very much. They all had this look like I was letting them down, and even when I could convince them to talk to me they wouldn't look me in the eye, and they'd always leave in such a hurry. If they did used to be my best friends, I don't think they want to be anymore...'

A shadow of that old, lost look from the first days after the accident passed over her face, as if she were right back at the beginning; confused and afraid of the huge, unfamiliar world that threatened to swallow her whole. Patsy felt a hot anger blooming in her chest, just as it had when Joan had talked about how hard Delia's accident had been for her. Not only had they all failed to visit properly outside their shifts, they had been so selfish in their reaction to the accident that they'd made Delia believe they actually disliked her. Patsy quite wanted to round them all up and give them a good shake. If they couldn't be there properly for their friend they should at least refrain from making it worse. But Delia was still sitting in front of her, looking small and hurt, and the last thing she needed was to hear a furious diatribe against the friends she had only just discovered she had. So Patsy did her best to suppress the frustration and think about what Delia herself would have said in this situation, had their positions been reversed.

She thought about Joan running up to her at the last minute outside the Nurses' Home to ask after Delia, and about the rest of them standing behind her, all looking ready to cry but not quite knowing how to approach. For the first time she considered whether it was her that had kept them away. After all, she had spent every minute of every visiting hour with Delia, and she had been relying so heavily on her brisk Nurse Mount facade in dealing with anyone else at the hospital (lest she break down and start crying in front of them, but they had no way of knowing that) that they might well have been a bit intimidated about the prospect of joining the visit. She felt the faint stirrings of guilt start in her stomach then, and although she hadn't entirely forgiven the others, she was able to respond to Delia's fears without betraying the feeling in her voice.

'It wasn't that they didn't like you Deels. They were sad for you, and I suppose they didn't know what to say, so they acted a little awkwardly. I think they were afraid of saying the wrong thing and upsetting you. I know it isn't exactly a helpful response... but I also know how much they care about you'.

'You never did that, and you were sad too'.

'It's not really the same'.

Patsy bit her lip. She shouldn't have said that. Delia was already frowning, clearly about to ask what exactly made it so different in Patsy's case. What could she possibly say to explain it away? To divert Delia's attention she changed the subject rather too quickly, aware even as she said the words that they might sound a little snappish, but unsure how to make it better beyond keeping her tone soft and offering Delia a smile, willing her to understand that she wasn't cross.

'Do you want to hear about them? If you'd rather not I don't have to say any more. We could just play another game instead'.

'No, you're right Pats. I do want to know. Please'.

Delia opened her memory book to a blank page, pen poised to take notes as she looked up at Patsy expectantly. Patsy almost said something else – an apology for her brusque change of direction, an assurance that Delia could ask whatever she liked... but of course she couldn't, could she? No matter what Patsy claimed to the contrary, she couldn't answer certain questions honestly. If she did it might put them both in danger, ruin any sense of safety Delia had been building in their new life and, if word spread any further, risk having her taken away to a psychiatric facility. There was no way the hospital would continue letting Patsy care for Delia if they knew who she really was to her.

So instead, she began to tell her about Joan, and Mary, and Trudie. For the next half an hour she went into as much detail as she could about her closest friends, as well as the more peripheral pals that had populated Delia's ward, the St John's ambulance team, even the boys from cubs. In the end Delia had eight fresh pages written out, and Patsy had written down the address and telephone number for the Nurses' Home.

'We could invite them over to the flat, if you wanted. I'm sure they'd love to see you'.

'I don't think I'm ready for that. It is nice to know there are other people out there that care about me, but I can't help thinking about the way they were with me in the hospital. I'm not ready for people to look at me that way again'.

'I'm sure if they saw you now, looking so much better and in your own home-'

'No Pats. It wouldn't be like it is with you, they'd feel like strangers. But, strangers that think I'm someone else and are expecting me to say or do things I don't know how to. And when I don't...'

Delia bowed her head for a moment, then gave Patsy a reassuring smile, to show she wasn't really too upset.

'I don't want them to visit. But... I think I might like to write to... which one was it?'

She paused to check the name in her memory book before continuing.

'I'd like to write to Joan'.