‘Merboy,’ I said.

What? Harry wrote.

I shrugged.

‘Mirror. I want a mirror.’ I hadn’t wanted to see myself before this.

There isn’t one, he wrote.

‘How do I look?’ I asked. I wanted to be the best for my mother when those curtains were pulled back. I wanted to be a big boy, a well-dressed boy, a snappy dresser. The jeans rubbed my scars and it felt odd to have fabric brushing the skin on my back. I kept plucking at the T-shirt. The shoes on my feet? They felt heavy, cumbersome. Harry stepped back, looked at me and turned up his thumb.

‘OK?’ Harry asked. I nodded and he swirled back the green curtains.

My mother cried when she saw me. Well, what else was she supposed to do? She didn’t cry gulping, face-twisting sobs, she’d done that too many times already. No, she cried silently, still able to write.

You look wonderful. Do you want me to come with you?

‘No.’ I was standing in my Levi’s, feeling different. I was in clothes and I could communicate. Why would I need my mother?

OK, she signed.

I looked at Harry and he smiled, opened the door of my room.

I’d been out of my room before to go to the bathroom, to go to the physio block — a corridor, a lift. But Harry walked me to another set of lifts and my hand drifted to hold his.

It was cool and plump. He smiled at me, winked again and punched a button in the wall.

‘Could take some time,’ he mouthed, and smiled.

I got ‘some time’.

The lift arrived and we stepped in, Harry and I. The lift to my physio ward had grey walls, marked by wheelchairs and stretchers. This lift, which was for visitors, was made of stainless steel, distorting mirror surface shuddering. I watched with some interest as a skinny, tall, near-bald boy, wearing trousers far too big for him, shifted from foot to foot, his back twisted, his eyes wide, holding the hand of a man wearing a bow-tie. It took ‘some time’, long enough for the lift to get to the ground floor, for me to realise exactly who it was. I yelped and tried to pull my hand away from Harry’s but he held on with a lion’s grip.

The doors opened and there they were — all the nurses, ward sisters, doctors and specialists I had ever seen in my months at the hospital. All the cleaners who had scooted round my room, all the ward orderlies who’d ever brought me food, all the porters who had wheeled me endlessly to and from the theatres. They lined the corridor, clapping, turning up their thumbs, making circles of thumb and forefinger, smiling and laughing with each other, smiling at me.

Harry pointed to the sliding automatic doors at the end of the corridor and raised his eyebrows. He took a small step and I followed him, clinging now to his hand. We walked like emperors, like conquering heroes along the long, polished linoleum floor. Hyacinth, the black cleaner who always wore scarlet lipstick to match her nail varnish, who nearly burst out of her bright pink overalls, who came in every morning at six and sang as she mopped (‘Mary Bring the Cattle Home Across the Sands of Dee’, my mother told me years later);