Whenever I go out with Hildegarde, we’re taken for lesbians, doubtless because most people must think, as we’re both abnormal – each in our different way – that if we’re together, it could only be for mating purposes. Like animals.

Whenever I go out with Hildegarde, she’s the one people notice, because she’s got a pretty astonishing look with her very long hair, her magnificent Madonna-like face and her tracksuits, which she wears no matter the occasion, the only clothes capable of covering her overly tall body. Then people look at me, but their gaze doesn’t linger because my crutches and legs with their orthoses make them feel vaguely sorry for me, and then they go back to her, telling themselves something’s not quite right. And then they stare at her, trying to work out what it is; something to do with her size and her proportions . . . and the little wheels start turning; the hard drive starts whirring: could I, couldn’t I, am I disgusted, am I turned on? She couldn’t give a shit, but the shamelessness of it all drives me crazy. In addition to her long limbs, Hildegarde has a neck like a giraffe and hands like spiders, plus all the things that don’t work on the inside, but you can’t see those.

I met her at the functional rehabilitation centre in Lorient where they sent me to learn how to walk again. We were sixteen years old and we’d both just been discharged from hospital, me after my accident and her following the umpteenth operation to straighten her spinal column.

The day I arrived, when they pushed me into the dining hall for the first time and into the free spot between two patients suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, two young people, crucified in their wheelchairs and at the end of their life expectancy, I started crying so hard that one of the carers came to take me back to my room, where I curled up on my bed, my face turned towards the wall. Same thing the next day. And the day after that. After three days, an improbable creature stopped by, her head encased in a metal halo held in place by pins driven into her skull and to which were attached traction splints fixed into a plaster corset: a scene of pure medieval horror.

What’s more, she was smiling, the idiot.

That’s Hildegarde!

‘Why are you crying?’ she asked me with a hint of annoyance in her voice.