* * *

I watch my wife steady the Blind Man’s arm as his dog manoeuvres him down the crowded steps outside Brown’s. I turn to Ian in the truck and sign, ‘I mean that he can’t even see Sonja — can’t see her beauty. At least I can do that.’ Ian and I have a habit of signing when the emotional heat is on full.

‘What else do you do?’ he signs in return.

‘I love her.’

Ian passes a hand over his other closed fist: ‘Not enough.’ He puts the truck in gear and pulls away from the kerb as the traffic warden who ticketed me outside Sonja’s deli watches us, confused by the flying fingers.

When I was lying in my bed in St Thomas’ Hospital, when I was not in a theatre, in a surgery, in a bathroom, I thought of my father. I was only thirteen but I knew that our pictures, our names, would have been in the papers, on television. But he still hadn’t come. He had left me twice. His absence was twice noted. Why didn’t he come? He must have read about the bombing, must have seen pictures of the aftermath. Perhaps the fact we were still drawing breath eased his conscience? I don’t know.

They tried to repair my ears, tried to build me new eardrums. But this was nearly thirty years ago and the techniques weren’t as sophisticated as they are now. They cut my ears off and with an uncluttered approach to my middle ear they tried to fashion drums from other soft tissue but the new tissue became infected and the operation failed again and again. And, of course, the German measles during my ruined mother’s pregnancy had done some damage — I had a degree of congenital nerve deafness. Which at least gave everyone — the nurses, the surgeons, my father — an out, an excuse, a justification for failure.

The skin grafts on my back, which took the blast, are clumsy but painless. The work on my face, which was slammed into the crumpling door of the Morris Minor as it turned like a wind-blown piece of paper, is better but not smooth and that’s why I wear a beard. My scalp is a maze of healed skin. I can indeed chart my life’s course by the scars I bear but, as I have said, some of them are unseen.

Of course, I can’t forgive them. Because it was, perhaps, at that moment, when my world blew apart, that I became essentially heartless. As the turn of the century approaches I read about the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland trying to deal with the stalling peace process and I think: Fuck you. All these years — twenty-eight to be precise — and nothing’s changed. Paisley is still bawling, the Taoiseach is still arguing, Gerry Adams is still sweet-talking the US President. And I can’t hear any of them. I have to read the newspaper reports of their inflexible exchanges because I can’t hear them. They offered us compensation, the English government, and my mother took it.