Hyacinth, who sat on the edge of my bed five mornings a week, taking my hand in hers and sketching letters on my soft undamaged palm with her gaudy, ring-encrusted black fingers, spelling out questions, jokes, comments on doctors; Hyacinth, who threw back her head and laughed in a way that I imagined I could hear, teeth gold-filled and glinting; Hyacinth burst from the knots of people and stopped me, put her hands gently on either side of my face, looked into my eyes and smiled. She tilted my head — so gently — and kissed my forehead. Tor you she mouthed, holding a small, gold-paper-wrapped present. She stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans and melted away into the crowd.

The glass doors to the infinite outside slid back, saving me from another reflection of myself, and Harry and I stepped out. The cold hit me like a slap and I shivered. Harry put his arm round me. He didn’t mouth anything, he didn’t write anything, he let his arm slip away very slowly and stood back, leaving me to gawp. I looked at the night skyline of London and watched in astonishment, the cold forgotten, as fireworks spotted the sky with false starlight, doubly false as the star-bursts were reflected in the Thames. It was Guy Fawkes Night and London was burning, smoke drifting.

I wanted my mother then and I turned, shading my eyes against the cordite flares, and there she was, eight storeys above me, hanging out of a window. I waved and she waved back. I flapped my hand for the first time in nearly a year, motioning for her to come down, but either she didn’t see the gesture or she ignored it, remembering the consequences of my flapping a hand.

It’s November here in Bristol, a sharp, unforgiving month. The frost has come early and winds saw at my hands as I work, arms aching in the cold, my padded shirt useless against this weather until I work up a sweat. Sonja and I no longer take our morning coffee out on the deck but sit instead by the Aga, wrapped in silence. Ian no longer sees her sitting with her Blind Man outside Bar Humbug, the City Farm, Torches, wherever they can sit and catch the sun. I wonder where they meet now, as the year draws to an end.

Last weekend Ian said to me, ‘Special, I don’t believe that you’ve done nothing about this, man. Said nothing about this. It’s been going on for months.’ We were in his flat sitting on the floor, resting our backs against the white cotton twill settee, smoking a joint and watching grey bolts of light swivel across the ceiling.

I passed the joint, exhaled, and said, 'I’m afraid that if I say anything, if I bring it out into the open, she’ll go. And then what will I do? It’s OK for you. You just live your life. But things for me aren’t so easy.’