I considered this. ‘I’ll marry her anyway.’

I didn’t hear Sonja’s soft entry, in bare feet on a slate floor. It was my mother’s flint-glance that made me turn to see Sonja watching me.

‘Special, you don’t have to,’ she said, and smiled.

‘But I want to.’ When I said this my voice must have had a touch of amazement: how could it be that anyone would not want to marry Sonja?

My mother tapped me on the shoulder and reluctantly I turned away from Sonja to look at the lipstick-furred edges of my mother’s mouth. It was the fine spray of saliva on my cheek — as if she’d just stabbed the lime inches from my face -that made me realise how angry she was. ‘There’s something wrong with her,’ my mother said, gesturing at Sonja with the empty glass.

All these years later I can still feel the spray of my mother’s spit and I rub it with my hand. But however hard I wipe, scrub my skin, however often, it’s still there, that spray. Because she was right. There is indeed something wrong with Sonja, there always was.

I’m eight years old and I’m standing in the middle of a living room in a shabby Victorian house in Earl’s Court, watching my mother, my beautiful, angle-poised mother, grabbing other people’s waists, swaying and screaming with delight, swilling drinks (no change there) because the score is 2-2. Then suddenly it’s 3-2 and my mother is crying, which is fine because she rushes over to me, kneeling right by the screen, and colourless sloe-scented drink spills down my front as she hugs me while the commentator bawls, ‘This is a heart-stopping moment!’ Well, it certainly was for me because all I could do was glance down at my scrawny chest and wait for my heart to stop. I watched everyone in the room as they danced, spilling Watney’s Red and cheap plastic-bottle red wine. I was watching for their hearts, and as I sat right next to the television, which was blaring in my ear, I heard someone yell, ‘They think it’s all over … It is now!’ And when I turned round it was to see a ball ballooning into the net as if it were itself an overblown heartbeat.

The first time I touched Sonja, really touched her, was in her bed in halls, the only place I felt safe then. She put my hand on her bare breast and smiled. Looked at me and said, ‘Burgundy wine.’

‘What?’

‘Wine. Your hand.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘Right.’

Three weeks later I stood in my mother’s kitchen and told her that I was going to marry Sonja and my mother said that there was something wrong with Sonja. That stormy night, after my mother had staggered to bed, we sat out on the deck with a bottle of red wine and I found out what it was.

Sonja told me then that she is a synaesthete: someone who tastes colours, sees music, feels sound, hears pictures, smells temperature. Her senses have mingled; they play randomly with each other. One sense is stimulated and another receptor stretches, like a dog on a hot pavement, and replies.