Well, Willard van Orman Quine, tell me about logic. Tell me: what is logical about wrapping your arms round an exhaust pipe as your mother’s face fills with shards of glass? Tell me: how was I supposed to make sense of the world when I walked down the steps and left Tommy’s behind? Explain to me the logic of never having heard my own broken voice. Tell me: was it a punishment for not having done anything wrong?

I went back to the flat and dressed in clean jeans and T-shirt, clipped my beard, threw Logic in the bin and went — nerves jabbering — to the student union. I stood uneasily at the bar trying, at last, to join in, and a beautiful blonde woman with grey eyes came over and held out her hand.

When I wake up on the floor this Christmas Eve morning, the fire’s dead, ash drifting from the grate on the draught from the ill-fitting door. My back’s aching because I slept on the rug without pillows and my hand is stiff with cold. The snow still hasn’t melted, and in the early-morning light the beach looks white and dead, scarred by rocks. I stumble, clumsy as ever, towards the kitchen, knocking the pile of letters from the hall table to the floor, before filling the kettle. I have to pack my few clothes and lock up the house before leaving for Ellen’s. I pour a mug of tea and sit at the table where I spent so many evenings with my mother.

My mother. I’ve read the journals, all of them. Twenty-eight years she has spent writing them and now I know about Dai Davies and what he did, that he left a hair-grip that was not hers in the middle of a pillow while she worked in a nearby restaurant, seven months pregnant. I know, now, the extent of her loneliness. I know that someone called Miles wouldn’t smile for her. I know how my back looked when I turned it to her in the hospital. I know that I have, somewhere, two half-brothers. I know that she thinks I married too young. I know how much she loves Ellen. I know, too, how much she loves me.

And I’ve never really told her anything. I haven’t spoken to her about Sonja, about what’s going on, about my paralysing fear of being lonely again. I haven’t told her about the Blind Man. I never told her that I knew when she sat with me in my room at Tommy’s, that even though I couldn’t hear her come in I could sense when she was there and it comforted me. I never told her that coming home from school and seeing her reading in the garden made me feel safe. I never apologised for my tantrums, when I blew up and howled because I couldn’t hear things, couldn’t do things, couldn’t swim. I’ve never tried to do something about her drinking. Never explained why I became a carpenter. I never even told her that I knew it wasn’t her fault I wasn’t special.