Straw-coloured curls, some darker and tighter – still wet from the shower – softened the angular lines of his youthful face. His pale lips, moist from the grapefruit juice, were pursed at the glass’s rim, his thoughts momentarily distracted. Behind his hazel eyes, dreams were still being dreamed as everyone about him, except Cai, broke their fast with salami and cheese, strong black coffee and chocolate croissants. The sun broke from the clouds and drenched him in brightness. Perplexed by the surges in his body, Cai stared at the man: he looked like one of the angels in a painting Max had liked so much that he’d brought the Isola Bella brochure down to dinner the previous evening to show Cai what he’d missed. A little girl in a high chair, her face blotched with Nutella, began to cry. The curly haired man lifted her onto his lap, muttered something in what Cai thought might be Dutch and kissed her cheek with those moist lips. It was a kiss Cai longed to taste. Glain, too distracted by her infatuation with Max, failed to sense Cai’s reawakening.

Then there were long months of chemotherapy… with puking, hair loss and despair. Some of the outer circle, in whom we’d chosen not to confide, assumed it was AIDS related. It was funny how their assumption sat so easily with Tudor and me. Men didn’t get breast cancer.

From Laveno, Cai planned to take the open bucket cable lift to Sasso Fermo and hike for a few hours on the ridge, seven hundred metres above the lake. Next to him in the queue for the early morning ferry stood a man about his own age. Cai noticed his sunken cheeks, weighed down by slate-grey bags beneath eyes of smudged brown… and the bluish, keloid scar that cut across his chin for more than an inch. The man said something in Italian to the middle-aged woman in the ticket booth that must have been funny because she laughed loudly. A group of impatient students, English Tory-types, pushed into the queue besides Cai, distracting him and drawing the opprobrium of the middle-aged Germans further back on the line. The man with the bluish scar moved down the long jetty and was lost in the crowd.

Cai saw him again, standing at the rail of the boat looking back at Cannero; he swept back the strands of hair that had blown across his face with nervous flicks of his fingers. Now he looked less sombre, the suggestion of a smile on his face. Cai watched him with no conscious motive. After some time the man turned towards Cai, and as if he’d sensed Cai’s interest, he nodded, said ‘Ciao,’ and headed for the door that led into the bar.

About a year after we thought that everything was okay, the back pain started and the doctor said that perhaps he should have a scan.