Worse than the pain, in a way, was the sense he had of having been insulted. Yes, insulted. It wasn’t just her, the doped-up bitch, slinging the stuff out of the beaker into his face. They were all in on it, the junkie, and the skinny one in the black dress, and the dozy-looking longshanks with the floppy hair, and the others, for he knew there must be others, that he hadn’t encountered yet. They had all spat on him, one big collective spit, that burned into his sense of himself as the acid had burned into his skin.

The Girl brought an enamelled basin and a clean cloth and began to bathe his burned skin. They sat together side by side on the bed with the basin between them. It was funny, really, he thought, the two of them here, in pain, him with his face and her with her wrist. She had put ice cubes in the water and the coldness felt good, almost like an anaesthetic. His face was still sore and stiff, but either the pain was easing or he was learning to cope with it.

Burns and scalds he had always feared. One night in a place in Greek Street he had found himself in the middle of a barney, and took a bullet through the fleshy part of his arm just below his left elbow. He hadn’t even known he was shot until it was all over and the bodies were being hauled out into the lane at the back and shoved into a brewer’s van to be taken away and dumped. Next day he couldn’t move his arm, and worried that the slug might have severed a nerve or something. One of Ronnie’s doctors, an alky with a permanent drop on the end of his nose, patched him up and told him to keep his arm in a sling and take it easy for a week or two. Three nights running he couldn’t sleep for the pain, but he didn’t mind. A hole in your arm would heal with no one the wiser, but a burn to the face left you marked for life.

The Girl was coming at him again with the soaked rag, but he pushed her hand away and got up off the bed. His mood had shifted. He was angry. The back of his shirt was damp. He looked at himself again in the mirror at the window, turning sideways to get a better look at his jaw. He touched the puffed and angry skin here and there with his fingertips.  Maybe it would heal, maybe it wouldn’t leave a scar. Anyway, he could get a skin graft – they could do amazing things, nowadays, those plastic surgeons.