My mother would sit during these hours, watching every move. The curious thing was that, although her lips had been pulled awry and her mouth swivelled a little, when she spoke I could always understand her, could understand her every word.

When the lesson ended, I’d go and stand at Harry’s window to look at London, look at life outside the glass. The trains pulling out of Waterloo, the cars, floors below, fighting the wheel of a roundabout, people crossing the roads, planes flying into Heathrow. In the distance I could see the Post Office Tower, the skyscrapers of the City. In the far distance I could still see London — it went on forever.

Then they broke my legs again and I retreated into my familiar shell of pain, wondering how much more of me there was to break.

I waited three-quarters of an hour for Darren Whiteside on his first day. It was half past eight when the door opened and he sauntered in, sour and resentful. He stood, looking at me sitting at my desk, his hands dangling by his side.

‘Darren Whiteside?’

He nodded, looked around the office.

‘You’re forty-five minutes late.’

He shrugged. Looked down, said something.

‘What?’

He said something about buses.

I stared at him. He was wearing a cheap, electric blue Umbro football shirt proclaiming him to be one of England’s finest football players, which wasn’t anything to boast about. He wore jeans eight sizes too big for him, slung round his hips with a loose belt, a reversed baseball cap and a pair of outsize Nikes, laces undone. As I looked at him he unwrapped some gum and began to chew it, mouth open. He was tall and thin, looked malnourished. His face was pale and spotted, his hair greased back, cut in a wedge shape, hanging limp in a straight line above a bristled neck. His eyes were sludge-coloured and narrow. Darren Whiteside was a spike, the kind of youth no bouncer in Bristol would let into a pub or club under any circumstances. Yet he looked familiar. I was confused - he reminded me of someone but how could it possibly be anyone I knew?

‘Tomorrow you get here at quarter to eight, like everyone else.’

He sighed, looked at his shoes, out of the window, moved back and half sat on the window-ledge, crossed his ankles. ‘I said tomorrow you get here at quarter to eight.’ No response.

‘What jobs have you done before?’

He talked for a moment at his shoes.

‘Pardon?’

Again he mumbled.

‘Darren, I’m deaf. If you want to talk to me you have to look at me so I can lip-read.’

He looked up from his shoes as a slow, foetid smile grew on his face. The rage of months, possibly of years, began to grow in me. I stood up slowly from my chair and it must have seemed to him that I kept growing and growing. As I said, Darren Whiteside was tall, but at six feet seven I generally expect to be the tallest man in a room. I was certainly the tallest man in that office. I motioned for him to follow me. As we left the office he stopped by the wastebasket and let the pupa-like piece of chewed gum drop from his mouth.