‘Right.’

‘Something where there’s some of me in it.’

‘Right.’ I grabbed a towel and wrapped the wound.

‘I want to open a delicatessen. How much money do we have?’

I looked at her beautiful, unexplained face in astonishment. Cerebral Sonja asking about money? ’A lot.’

‘Enough to buy a shop?’

‘Depends where.’

‘Whiteladies Road.’

‘Right.’

‘So can I do that? I can look into it?’

‘I don’t know. You haven’t told me how much it’ll cost.’ She mouthed a figure so colossal, so alarming, that I dropped the towel. ‘Bugger me!’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘So are you and looking at you is free.’

‘Ah, come on, Special - be serious. I really want to do this. OK, I’ve been studying and you’ve been working, but who ever said that the two weren’t the same? They’re both work. I’m just so bored with university. I feel like I’m marking time, not going anywhere.’ She dropped the jack saw and dust flew from the floor as she walked back up the basement steps and closed the door, stirring dust in eddies.

‘Right.’ It was Harry who had infected me with this verbal tic, this catch-all word, ‘right’. I’ve never shaken it off.

When my bleeding thumb had staunched, I went upstairs and lay on one of the sofas, a deep, comforting yet lonely bed. I lay and watched car headlights scallop the ceiling. We did have the money, I knew that. She could have her beautiful shop and fill it with delicacies. But there was the rub. Something she could hold, she’d said? Jesus. She holds a tennis ball and thinks of custard; holds a Mont Blanc fountain pen and tastes copper; holds my hand and thinks burgundy wine. I mean, I was struggling — a delicatessen run by a synaesthete? Eventually I slept fitfully, to be woken by daylight, and went to our bedroom. Sonja was sprawled across the mattress, a sheet dangling from one foot, the cotton fabric lapping like milk on the carpet in the dawn light. As I say, live with a synaesthete and the world is no longer your own. It becomes an ocean of experience into which we dip, hoping that what we reel in bears some relationship to what others feel.

I touched her heel and she groaned. ‘We have the money, honey. Buy it today.’ I watched her wake up, watched her encounter her world. It was a Tuesday morning. Was she tasting opals? Hearing mustard seas? Seeing calypso? Who knows? It takes Sonja a long time to connect to the world as we know it. She has a lot of data to rearrange.

She turned to me and smiled, her hand reached out to touch mine and my heart missed a beat. Literally. Missed. A. Beat. There was an absence in my chest. I love you, Special,’ Sonja said, smiling. And my heart stopped.