Ian put the flowers in the vase and stood by the bed. ‘I’m not going to stay. I spoke to the nurse on the desk and she says you’re doing fine. You’ll be home tomorrow so I’ll come round then. Just wanted to see you were OK.’ Looking at his face I could see the hair-thin scar running through his lips where my fist had split them.

It wasn’t until Sonja and I came back from our honeymoon, when we moved into our studio flat off Battersea Park, that I realised I was a man — or, at least, according to everyone else I was a man. I’d grown up. I spoke to people about ‘my company’, ‘my career’, ‘my ambitions’. But all these labels, these names for things, never seemed to belong to me. I bought house insurance, applied for credit cards, started a pension. I filled in forms that asked about my ‘wife’. My wife? It had happened too quickly. I wasn’t capable of being this thing — this grown man, a husband. I said nothing. I nodded and ticked the ‘married’ box with one hand and I rubbed my worrystone with the other, waiting to be found out, rumbled. I even learned to be called ‘Mr Player’ without smiling broadly at the humour of this.

I know now the reason for that feeling of dislocation, why I felt fraudulent: I was never a teenager. I went to London on my thirteenth birthday, then spent the next six years learning how to walk, how to speak, how to listen all over again. There were no girlfriends or parties. I didn’t have the opportunity to brush tongues and feel breasts in dark bedrooms, lying on piles of coats. I didn’t have my blooding in a pub, getting drunk for the first time. I didn’t lie in bed late every weekend morning, listening to music and masturbating. I didn’t watch television. I was even robbed of that rite of passage — the first pair of Levi’s. I didn’t play pool or darts, didn’t drive down to Newquay with a group of friends, surfboards and tents lashed to the roof-rack. I didn’t have a Walkman, a stereo, a car radio. What I did have was my mother and Ellen and my books. And then I had my wife.

Sonja brought me home from hospital after the bandage had been unwound and the needle in my hand removed. I was tired because I’d been woken every half-hour the night before for my blood pressure to be taken. The skin on my skull was sore and my neck stiff. I changed into pyjamas and lay on the sofa in the living room. Sonja brought me scrambled eggs, bowls of Häagen-Dazs, chocolate mousse and painkillers. She stoked the fire and left me to sleep, which is all I did for the next few days. She came home every lunchtime and left work early every night to come and sit with me, bringing me newspapers and flowers, fresh meringues and the pecan and walnut twists I loved. Every few hours she changed the pillow case because blood seeped through the gauze and left penny-size spots on the fabric.