Sonja and I are lying in bed in Ellen’s house. It’s late afternoon and through the sash windows the changing colours of Christmas lights wrapped round a tree in the neighbour’s garden are thrown on to the ceiling, and as I watch them I’m reminded of the night when I lay on the settee and thought about Sonja buying her deli, wondering whether she’d be able to do it because every taste, every sound, every touch bleeds one into another for her, and then I went to wake her and my heart stopped and I fell, ‘Timber? on the carpet and when I came back to life I was running on batteries and Sonja was butchering all the bleeding hearts in the garden, and that reminds me of the tangled, untamed garden where my mother sat and read while she waited for Miles Brandrin, knowing that he would make her smile and feel loved whereas nothing I ever did when I was Merboy made her feel that way, yet I’d arrive home to find my mother waiting for me, making plans for my life, plans that didn’t include us being blown apart, forcing us to live different lives, lives that weren’t what we wanted, weren’t what we anticipated, and so we’ve become heartless, encouraged to live only by a man wearing bright red braces or so I thought until I met Sonja who fell on to a rumpled bed with me and brought me back to life but now that life is gone because she’s chosen a blind man over a deaf one — a decision Dai Davies would no doubt have applauded because I was never special, even before I was born I wasn’t special enough for him and I can imagine that somewhere my two half-brothers are living their special fucking lives, mourning Daddy, and I don’t want to see them because what would they ask me and how would I hear them and anyway I have a question of my own. I turn to Sonja and ask, ‘Who is the Blind Man?’

Once I’d thrown logic into the bin and then met the One, my life changed. Sonja and I spent every evening together, usually in her small chaotic room in halls. I could never find a safe foothold among all the clothes and books on the floor and Sonja would watch me flail around, crashing into the sink, knocking the lampshade, eventually falling on to the bed. For weeks we talked and then one evening Sonja fell on to the bed with me as the light-bulb swung crazily and my hands became burgundy wine. Later she held one of them, looked at it a while.

‘We both live on small islands,’ she announced, and promptly fell asleep.

Small islands? ‘Right,’ I said.

I look at Sonja, her face flushing red, green and yellow as the Christmas tree opposite flashes and I can see she’s crying.

She’s lying on the bed, on her back, and colourful tears are trickling down on to the pillow.