Ellen. I met her one day as I sat on a wall outside Tommy’s, smoking. She came outside dressed in a flimsy green gown, her face drawn, walking unsteadily, but about her there was an air of something like dignity. She sat next to me in the pale afternoon sun.

‘I've heard about you,’ she said, her voice ringing with an American accent. ‘I heard about the bomb and what happened to you and your son. I can’t say anything that will make it better but I’m so sorry. That’s a terrible thing to happen. So poindess.’

‘Yes.’

‘How is he?’ She looked at my face without flinching, able to see every scission in the relentless light. ‘He won’t speak to me.’

‘He’s deaf now - that right?’

‘Yes,’

‘Give him time. Maybe he’s just trying to work out the new world in his head.’

‘The first time he saw me he looked at my face and turned away. That was a couple of months ago and he hasn’t looked at me since.’

‘Jesus — well, it must have been a shock. Your face, I mean. I saw the pictures in the papers, of when you were younger. You were very beautiful.’

I looked at her, stared into her unwavering gaze, and realised that dignity wasn’t what she had, exactly. Something more than that. I held out my hand. ‘Joan Player.’

‘Ellen Matthiesen.’

Every day after that, while Ellen was in Tommy’s, we met for coffee in the canteen or a slow walk around the hospital. Friendships forged in hospitals are unlike those forged anywhere else, they exist outside time, outside the run of days of normal lives. Everything is suspended as if there is somewhere the person you used to be, frozen at a moment in time (11.03 a.m. on the 11 November 1971?), waiting to resume her life while the other self walks through months, trying to sift what is important from life already lived. Money, careers, parties, sex, houses, cars — all of these are frozen in the other life too. The only thing to focus on is what might be left when — if - you return to yourself. Ellen had breast cancer and the most she could hope for was remission, the borrowing of time. Her right breast had been removed and I knew she wondered, when she was alone, where it had gone.

We sketched out our lives for each other during those slow walks - the husbands, the houses, the jobs — in faint, fine lines, spare and careful. We talked about literature, education, art, talked about anything but the idea that time might only be borrowed. We did talk about John, about what he might expect. Looking back I realise that we had both forfeited something; I think it was the future.

She was — she is - the least sentimental and most caring person I have ever met. And now she’s driving through the night to come to me because I couldn’t answer the question Are you all right?’