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My mother’s injuries, although horrific, were mainly razoring glass cuts and broken bones. She healed faster than I did, her wounds scabbing over then flaking away to reveal the pits and incisions on her face. Her left eyebrow was twisted, leaving one eye squinting down the remaining days of her life. Her broken ribs, legs and arm were set and the jagged tips melded together. She came to my room every day once she was able, at first sitting in her wheelchair and later limping in to sit in the chair by the bed. Her hair was lifeless and she was pale, broken. She didn’t read, she simply sat and watched my breathing back, for that is what I turned to her. It must have been a small back, the spine visible as delicate, shiny bumps moving slightly under the damaged skin. My mild English tan, the tan I held over from one summer to the next, would have faded. At first I was always naked, the sheets held away from my skin by a flimsy frame. The skin grafts were exposed while they healed, and that’s what my mother stared at for hours every day. She must have been willing the skin to close, to change from angry red to pink.

I don’t know if she spoke to me — how could I know? — but I think she did. I’ve never asked her. I think she sat and moved her rearranged, frayed lips, framing words in a different way, urging me to come back into the world. As my grafts closed and the frame was replaced by a flimsy blue gown she was discharged but she didn’t go home, back to the cottage. She rented a flat in Lambeth and came to see me every day. She was there by seven in the morning and left at eight at night. Each day she would bring something - some fruit, a comic, a poster, Subbuteo, a picture from a magazine, a mobile, a pack of cards, a bottle of Ribena, flowers, a packet of wine gums. She stuck the pictures on the walls, stacked the comics on my table, dangled the mobiles from the beams. By the end of my time there, my room was a boy’s Aladdin’s cave, full of spinning colours and hundreds of pictures. And all the time she talked to me, unheard, touched my undamaged skin and talked to me.

It was months before I turned to look at her. That much she did tell me. From the time when I glanced at her in the Morris Minor, flapping my hand at an empty parking space, to the time I turned on to my tender back and looked at her healed face, three months had passed.

What had I been thinking as I lay on my side, wrapped in silence, staring at the beige wall? I can still see that wall now, see all its pits and scars, the black scuff marks where the trolley wheels carrying the blood-pressure monitor always scraped. The gouge in the plaster near the skirting-board where something had landed with a crash, which I would not have heard. As time passed the wall filled with pictures — of footballers, of yachts, of waves. My favourite was a poster of men surfing Big Wednesday off the coast of Hawaii. The waves reared tens of feet into the air, almost tumbling back on themselves, but I knew, I always knew, that they would fall and break. And there, balanced on flimsy boards, were two men, specks against the endless blue, arms outstretched, knees bent, black shadows against the raging blue waters. I looked at the men and I tasted salt in my mouth, felt spray turning over me. I must have stared at that picture for hours as my body struggled, for it was not only trying to mend, it was trying to grow. I was thirteen years old and I was growing.