‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ the older officer said. Ellen stared at his cropped, grey hair. ‘Are you Ellen Matthiesen?’ he asked, and at that moment her abdominal muscles slammed shut like a vice round her rounded belly.

Ellen told me this many years ago.

She also told me that her labour lasted three days; three days she spent breathing deeply, sweating, her hands clamped round steel rails, screaming and bellowing. Three days birthing her already dead child. When it was over, when the drama was done and she was reduced to a childless, husbandless woman slowly, or, rather, very quickly, going out of her mind, the grey-haired policeman visited her in hospital. Ellen was lying in bed, scrubbed and scraped clean, staring at the sky. He came into the room, holding his cap, and said nothing. Then he went to Ellen, wrapped his arms round her and held her against his big chest and she held on to him as if she was drowning. He tried to soothe her, stroked her hair. Apparently he was crying too as he held her, disbelieving that so much could happen to a woman in one night.

Ellen and I don’t play the one-upmanship-in-misery game but if we did I think she would win hands down.

‘I persuaded Matt to go fishing so I could wrap his Christmas presents. I didn’t know he’d never come back.’

‘I missed the turning over Battersea Bridge. I didn’t know it would make a difference.’

Small choices.

10 July 1999

Ask her,’ Ellen says about Sonja. Ask her if she’s having an affair, if she’s going to leave John. How can I possibly do that? Sonja is a closed circle which spins in its own orbit. After that first night when I met her — when I looked at her and knew something was wrong — I never asked her again what exactly synaesthesia means to her, what it does to her. After she looked at me and said, ‘It’s not a disability,’ and stared my drunken self down with those beautiful grey eyes I just couldn’t ask about it again. Is it her foreignness that’s her defence? I don’t know. I can feel the splintered planks of the deck beneath me, taste whisky burning my tongue. I can see the arch in moonlight, smell my own sweat this hot June night. I’m listening to a car crunch down the lane, changing gear, brakes squealing. What would she experience in my place? I have no idea.

Yet she allows John into her closed circle, allows him to orbit her world with her. He found a way in and I never thought anyone else ever would. But now I’m sure someone else has. If I could just see her for a minute, a moment, I could look into her eyes and I would know. She never met Merboy, of course, and I wonder what she would have made of him — my salty wild boy. Sometimes I wonder if she is touched by John — if he stirs pity in her. God, I hope not. He doesn’t deserve to be pitied. None of us does.