In the middle of the night I sing to her. The hours in hospital are strange, liminal things; they vanish and they still. It becomes easier to compartmentalise time into the seconds when the numbers marking oxygen levels or heart rate dip or swell, or the time granted by the silencing of the machine that pushes the drugs through a tube. And so perhaps it makes sense that we are all most awake between 10pm and 2am, the closest thing a ward full of ill children has to business hours.

This is when the cannulations happen and the blood tests and the drugs. It’s when the big decisions are made. The observations come more swiftly and the rogue bleeps. I think about cups of tea, grab an orange instead. My fingers wear its oily residue. Citrus hangs in the sterile air. I fill up little bottles with milk my daughter is too unwell to have tubed into her stomach. Some of them will get left behind in the nurses’ fridge when we leave. I pace the corridors. It is known on this ward that I can’t handle seeing the procedures, that I can’t risk breaking if I am to mother these children of mine. So I stand there, in my pyjamas, mentally adjusting the proportions of the animals painted on the walls.