I can’t remember how she persuaded me to go but I did. Four of us in a car, an old VW Beetle, driving to the 100 Club on Oxford Street to see the Darts. Literally, in my case. I’d never been to a gig — why would I? — and I couldn’t believe the energy of the club, how crowded it was, how smoky, how mobile. People moved all the time, swaying, touching, grabbing each other, hugging, drinking, waving, smooching, whatever. They were dancing even before the gig began. The Darts came on stage - ironic, retro swing-band apparently, silver suits and leopardskin shoes, a beautiful black woman fronting in an hourglass vermilion dress — and the crowd moved as one around me. The woman could sing — or, at least, I knew she could enunciate. I swayed with the crowd as Sonja held my hand in a blood-stopping grip, constantly darting looks at me. But I was happy. I watched the woman’s hips and lips, and picked up some phrases: ‘… the boy from New York City’, ‘Zing went the strings of my heart’. ‘Life’, apparently, ‘could be a dream …’ I was enchanted. I was also drunk as a skunk and the beautiful black woman’s lips were at the centre of my universe. I swayed with the rest of the crowd, sweating and yelling and somehow knew that it didn’t matter what I yelled, no one could hear, except Sonja but she managed to laugh and look appalled at the same time. The people around me were clicking their fingers and I watched them for a while, then picked up the rhythm and joined in. I joined in. When it had finished, when we were standing outside on the crowded, traffic-jammed street, I grabbed Sonja, lifted her off her feet and kissed her, tasting martini and fresh lemon. And lust.

I turned to look at Sonja, sleeping still, her arms thrown back, her hair on the pillow, and thought, I love you, thought, Is six weeks long enough? Thought, Come here.

I walked into the office at half past seven, happy for the first time in months, made slow by rekindled desire. Ian was already there. He turned away from a folder of invoices, looked at me and smiled, raising an eyebrow.

‘Life,’ I said, falling into my chair, ‘could be a dream.’

The door flew open and Darren Whiteside walked in, chewing gum, and said something about ‘fucking buses’.

After many months, when my grafts had healed, I was taken swimming. Or, rather, the physiotherapists called it swimming; I thought of it as floating in a piss-pool. As part of my treatment I was wheeled from my room and taken down in the beige lift by one of the porters to the basement of the hospital where there was a small, pale blue cube of chlorinated water. The room had no windows and a wheezing pump laboured to change the air in there, inevitably failing. It smelled of mould and heat, of sweat and wet wool. It smelled of despair.