I finish my tea, stand up and stretch my tight, grafted back, as the steam train trundles along its tracks, billowing pungent, sooty smoke and a woman walks past, wearing headphones, just as Darren Whiteside does, her hips sashaying to the rhythm. Behind her, on the deck of a houseboat, a man is playing a clarinet. I look down and at my table a little girl, maybe three, four, I don’t know, is watching me stretch and is pointing, saying something. She is smiling, with a thumb in her mouth, so I can’t read her lips. I know it’s something about giants but I can’t read her. All I can do is smile in return and walk away along the river towards the Arnolfini. And I think about how much I want to hear it all — the ferries, the cars, the buskers, the buses, the smiling child saying something about a giant, the steam train, the planes flying overhead. Most of all I want to hear the man play the clarinet, because I’ve never heard its music, I only know its name. I stop and look at the river running and I can see Dr Laws’ face smiling wolfishly, saying, ‘You’ll be able to swim.’

I had sat, not long before, with Sonja in the Port of Call watching her realise that she would have to rearrange her calendar, waiting until I was whole to do whatever she wanted to do. Leave me or stay. I’d watched her and thought I would do it, have the operations, in order to keep her. What foolishness, as my mother would say. It was me who would clamber on to the trolley to be taken to theatre. I was the one who’d lie there, watching scalpels being arranged on a steel tray, knowing one of them would be used to slice the skin behind my ears, not knowing if I would wake up with a frozen face or if I would even wake up at all. I look back at the man playing the clarinet and a wave of anger pushes my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

The memory of the smoky love Sonja and I had made stayed with me for days. I took the memory out and examined it, turning it over in my fingers, many times each day. The days themselves turned crisp and sharp as we moved towards December, the freezing rain and grey clouds of November forgotten.

Many builders lie fallow in winter, perhaps turning their hands to interior work, to knocking down walls, replastering, plumbing new bathrooms, sanding floors. Elemental worked right through the seasons. I made sure that each job had been started, the foundations literally laid, before the weather turned foul. Hard wood has an open heart, it is easy and malleable, it can stand the cold and the rain, can be left, once seasoned, in all weathers. Wood withstands all this with a tad of shrinkage and the occasional crack, but human flesh is not as sturdy.