The heart is described as the seat of all emotion; I realise that now, realised it when they put the metal box in mine. A heart of steel. When a leg is injured you favour the other, when a finger is damaged, the other hand comes into play, when one eye has a stye, the other watches the world. But what happens when your heart is damaged? What do you favour? I’ll tell you: you favour yourself.

Sonja is still seeing her Blind Man. I know this because Ian tells me he sees them together everywhere. I know this because she is different. I’m retreating as far as the Severn tide and she says nothing. I think she no longer cares. I don’t ask questions in the evenings during our time together on the deck, in the garden, in our living room. I read and I watch her, knowing she wants to be elsewhere.

‘Ask her about it,’ Ian said. ‘Ask her anyway.’

I try to imagine what, exactly, I’m supposed to ask her. ‘Do you still love me?’

‘Have I done something wrong?’

‘Why don’t you want to dance with me?’

‘Are you fucking the Blind Man?’ Every time I phrase that question my heart jumps, misses a beat, and my fists curl. I miss her but how can I ask her that? And what would she answer?

It seems I have forgotten once again how to speak.

It was Harry who took me outside Tommy’s for the first time. He came into my room and enunciated, ‘GET DRESSED’, in such a way I knew it was a command. Dressed? What did he mean?

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked.

Get dressed. You’re going outside for a walk. He wrote the note and threw it at me.

‘Outside?’

He smiled for an answer, his white teeth matching the polka dots on his bow-tie. I looked at my mother — still there, still there. She nodded and smiled with one side of her face - this was her shorthand for ‘I’m too tired to cover half my face.’ She reached beneath the hospital bed for a bag and what did she drag out? What else could she have pulled out other than a T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s?

The clothes I had worn while writhing on the stretcher all those months before had been, first, blasted, bloodied and scorched, and then cut from me. I had been naked for much of my stay at Tommy’s, as the grafts settled. Then I had spent months in gowns, used to everyone seeing my arse.

My mother and Harry watched me as I fingered the Levi’s, stiff and twice-folded. I smiled. Harry winked at me and pulled the curtain round the bed, shooing my mother outside. He bustled around, helping me balance as I put one limp foot into a leg of the jeans, helping my befuddled hands pull the fly zip, slipping the white T-shirt over my head. I was like a child, I’d even forgotten how to dress. And then I stopped, remembering I was a child: Merboy.