‘Yes, my — my.’ We laughed again.

She traced out the sentence, ‘My name is Hyacinth.’ I tried to say the name, watched her mouth and copied it, over and over, until she clapped her hands and rocked on the bed. ‘Yes! Yes! Hyacinth.’ Only, of course, I was saying ‘Hyacint’ just as she did.

Then she traced, ‘I HAVE A NAME FOR YOU.’ ‘John Player?’

She shook her head, and traced, ‘SPECIAL.’

‘Special?’

She nodded and pulled a cigarette packet from her pocket. She held it out to me and there, embossed on the black packet in gold letters, were the words John Player Special. I was enchanted, kept turning the packet in the light of the bedside lamp, watching the letters change colour. I laughed again, enjoying the feeling, my pain forgotten for the first time, and it was then that my mother walked in, to see me laughing aloud, an enormous black woman sitting on my bed, holding a packet of fags.

When I woke the next morning the first thing I saw was a poster, trimmed of its picture of cigarettes, pinned above the picture of the men surfing the rollers, the poster black and gold. ‘John Player Special,’ it said ‘for when you want the best.’ My mother had asked, cajoled and eventually bullied the tobacconist on the corner of her road in Lambeth to pull it down from his window and give it to her. She had come in early so it would be in place when I woke up. Minutes later Hyacinth walked in, bawling, ‘Mary Bring the Cattle Home Across the Sands of Dee’, shocking my mother, who was snoozing, into sudden wakefulness. Hyacinth saw the poster and roared with laughter, slapping her huge chest with her jewelled hands. My mother and I joined in.

Hyacinth did that — made my mother and me laugh out loud, together.

I leave Dr Laws and walk out of St Michael’s Hospital, standing in the ambulance bay at the entrance, swaying, unbalanced by the unexpected. The hospital’s patients give me a wide berth as I contemplate what to do. I can walk home, gather my tools, put them in my truck and do some work chez Psychobitch. Or I can walk to Whiteladies and take Sonja out to lunch. I stuff my hands in my bagged, stretched pockets and walk down Tyndalls Park Road. As I walk, I turn my world over and over in my mind. A few days before I had decided to ask Sonja, as Ian badgers me to do, about the Blind Man. Indeed, I’d selected the very words with which to ask her. Yet and yet … this morning she had called me Special rather than John for the first time in months. She had tugged my beard, she had kissed me. And now this — an invitation to allow someone to lop off my ears, slicing through old scars, in order to snip at my neck and try again.