Ohana script on a wrist

His name was Kawika Mahoe, though everyone on the ward called him Kiki. He'd come over from Honolulu to work the cranes at Hull docks twenty years back and never gone home. Every Christmas his mother's people sent a letter, thick with cousins' names. When his chest packed in, eleven of them got on planes. Eleven. They slept in the corridor in shifts, ate cold chips from the machine on level two, and argued over whose turn it was to fetch his tablets. His sister-in-law kept telling the consultant there were too many visitors. Nobody listened to her.

The third night the bay went quiet, and the youngest cousin, a girl with a biro stuck in her hair, sat on the end of the bed and told him the word for it. Ohana. Family, she said, and then she gave him the rest, the bit that gets lost whenever anyone tries to translate it. Nobody gets left behind, nor forgotten. She drew the word on her own wrist in biro while she talked, looping the flourish out and back again, and he laughed until the monitor complained.

Kiki went home in the end, though not the way he'd planned. He went on the Thursday, with all eleven round the bed singing something I'm not qualified to repeat. On the Friday the girl came back alone and asked the desk for a pen, because she'd forgotten to write down the word for goodbye. We hadn't got one. So I gave her mine. Drink your tea.