‘Dr Laws said that if it works, if I don’t have any perforations in my eardrums, I can swim again. Even if I can’t hear I may be able to swim.’

‘Well, John, that’s wonderful.’

I want to pick up my pint of Smiles’ and throw it somewhere. ‘Yes.’

‘So — will you do it? Have the operation?’ Sonja looks like a mildly interested cousin, three times removed, but I think she has realised that among the thousand traps my mind has laid itself there are some waiting for her.

‘Well, I have to be assessed, apparently. Some tests that work out if I’m the right stuff. Because some people have it done and think they’ll hear everything and they don’t. Or maybe they’re not physically OK. You know. The way I look at it, I never heard much anyway, so … yes, I’ll do it if I can.’

In the gloom I see a darker shadow cross her face, as one of the traps slams shut, snaring her options. I know she won’t leave me until I am whole again. And I know, too, what her next question will be.

‘So,’ she says, lowering her grey eyes to stare at her beer, ‘did Dr Laws say how long you’d have to wait?’

‘No, he didn’t. You could ask when you phone him.’

‘Yes, I could, couldn’t I?’ She stares out of the window, mentally rearranging the calendar of her life, listening to her options squeal as they are squashed one by one under the heel of my decision.

Harry of the spotted bow-ties, lurid braces and smooth, chubby face, was a child psychologist, specialising in psycholinguistics. I know that now but when I was in Tommy’s I thought he was just a nice man who came to see me a lot. Which, in a way, was true. Years later Harry wrote to me at school and told me that he took me on as a personal crusade after a case conference when he heard of my injuries, my silence, my constantly turned back. When he heard that I was an only child, with no father and an eternally damaged mother. When he heard that the degree of my trauma was so severe, so extreme, that I hadn’t said a word for five months and seemed incapable of speech. That I’d forgotten, it would seem, how to live, how to love, how to speak. He said he sat in the conference room and his chest tightened until he felt he couldn’t draw breath. When the surgeons began discussing how they intended to break my legs again and reset them, he made his excuses and left the room. He walked the long linoleum corridor, scene of our later triumph, and wandered around outside the hospital, smoking cigarettes, waiting for his chest to ease. Once it had he went back to the main entrance, crossed to the reception desk and asked for pen and paper, took off his white coat and came to my room. He sat on the bed and wrote, Hello, John, I'm Harry. How are you today?