‘This is an intervention, is it?’ I say in a fake Californian accent, my sarcasm failing to disguise my terror.

‘More like the last chance saloon,’ Ant says.

‘Isn’t a last chance saloon meant to have liquor?’

‘Funny.’

Kerry still hasn’t said a word to me. But she stays in the room after Ant goes down to the cafe.

It begins. The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.

Kerry sits with me during the days, and holds my hand and even embraces me when I shake. She takes away my puke, brings me cereal and toast, takes me to the toilet outside, though she lets me piss and shit alone so long as I don’t lock the door. But she still doesn’t speak, beyond asking me what I want.

It’s Ant who talks to me in the dark. He tells stories I’ve forgotten from our childhood. First thing this morning, he started one and then put his hand to his mouth when he remembered that the memory was connected to football. Most of my best memories are.

‘It’s OK, Ant. They were the good times.’

We play cards, talk about his dad’s failing health, his mother’s bitterness that the dreams she’d had of their retirement years have been replaced by the slow lonely drudgery of stroke and vascular dementia.

But discussing anything else after my cardiac arrest is off-limits. My choice.

I’m too tired to fight. They bring in a private GP to prescribe something for my nausea, but apart from that it’s the three of us, sweating together in the flat, as one hot day turns into another. I don’t know what Kerry’s told Tim to explain her absence, but maybe he’s too scared to ask. She’s still raging at both of us for screwing up her life.

‘Why are you helping me, Kerry?’

It’s day four – the shakes have stopped and I am waiting for the hallucinations – when I finally ask her a direct question. She seems to be weighing up whether to answer so I keep talking.

‘I’ve ruined your life. You said so yourself. Are you trying to get made a saint?’

‘Canonized,’ she says. ‘When you’re made a saint, it’s called canonization.’

‘Thanks. Of all the things that need fixing about me, improving my vocabulary has to be high up the list.’

She can’t stop the smile that twitches on her lips. ‘Well, well, a full sentence! Makes a change from the grunts and the moans. Does this mean you’re feeling better?’

‘For now.’

‘Hungry? I can ask Ant to make you whatever you like.’

What I really want is for her to talk to me, but offering me a choice of food seems like a big leap forward. ‘I don’t know what I like.’