Chapter 14 Summary

John finds his mother in the last bed on Ward 81 of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying. She's staring incomprehensibly at the television box at the foot of the bed, drifting in and out of sleep. The nurse, who's amazed John should cast such importance on a single person, leaves him to sit at the side of the bed. There, John remembers all the moments of his childhood—Linda singing to him, her strange and childish rhymes and her stories of the beautiful and wondrous Other Place, so far from the actual reality of Civilization.

His thoughts are interrupted by the intrusion of a bunch of eight-year-old twins dressed in khaki. They swarm around the bed, horrified and fascinated by the flabby, bloated woman in the bed. They point and make fun until John seizes the nearest one by the collar and...