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About
Ward staff. Brings Ilyas the evening list (chapter 17) and the round list (chapter 21), and does not come further into the room than the frame of the door. Ilyas takes her off nights — he rubs out three of her initials on the rota, writes his own into two of them, and leaves the third blank, with the crumbs of the eraser still in the box. That blank is the chapter's statement of what the ward cannot cover.
How they speak
Brief to the point of near-silence; the prose gives her presence and gesture rather than speeches. What characterises her is that she does not raise the rash and does not stop working.