Chapter One: John
Ian's black hands are stark against white marble as we wrestle Hercules from his plinth, sweating fingers slipping on the capital's volutes (I remembered, Ma, I remembered) made slimy by moss. Even Ian and I struggle to carry the god up the steps of the deck. We edge like crabs down the side of the house, resting the bust on the path every few feet, and then there is the problem of hoisting him into the removal van. I climb into the echoing space and grab Hercules' ears as Ian pushes at his bearded chin. A passer-by trots over to help, a short, skinny man who looks ludicrous next to Ian's bulk. He says something as Hercules thuds on to the van floor and Ian smiles, shakes the man's tiny hand.

Ian disappears round the back of the house as I edge-walk Hercules to the back of the van, to stand among the others: Pan, resting his pipes on shaggy concrete knees; Apollo, looking smug (and where were his> oracles when you needed them?), Achilles; Narcissus; the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus; a unicorn with a delicate weathered horn; the many gryphons, gargoyles and sphinxes. All of them marking the passage of another year -- my mother's birthday gifts to me. There's not much else -- a few boxes of books and black plastic bin-bags of clothes, my tool-boxes, routers, drills and workbench.

Ian reappears, carrying the plinth under one arm, as easily as a roll of carpet, and slides it along the van floor.
'That it?' he asks.

I find myself tugging hard at the tip of my beard, a sure sign of something. 'I'm just going to check I've got everything.' I walk down the path and through the gate out on to the deck. I wouldn't say it's my favourite (the wooden half-boat deck with its bowsprit maiden has a special place in my heart) but it is possibly the best-crafted. It was, after all, a labour of love -- odd to think of that now. I touch the knobbled scar buried under my hair, carved by a falling lemonade bottle, as my other hand plays with the worrystone in my pocket. The green malachite stone has been worried for nearly thirty years, worried paper-thin, and as I stand in my garden, memorising every plant, every tree, it finally snaps in two.

I walk back to the van, out into weak May sunlight, and before I pull down the rolling door I look again at the statues, boxes and bags. Is that all there is?

The night before my thirteenth birthday I couldn't sleep, kept awake by the excitement of the thought of going to London for the weekend. Although she was in her bedroom, I could hear my mother murmuring on the telephone; the cottage was so small any sound filled it. I switched on the bedside lamp and opened my book, only to read the words 'His heart broke'. I threw down the book, turned off the light and pulled my heart-warmed blankets tighter around me, thinking, His heart broke? His heart broke? How did it break? Did it shatter into a thousand pieces? Or did it snap into two bloody halves, without a sound? Through my open bedroom window I could hear the sea slapping round the pilings in the creek as I burrowed deeper into my bed. I could see my breath on the cold air as I listened to salt-water turning pebbles and rocks. Looking into the darkness of my childhood room I decided I would never break my heart. I imagined holding it close, warm and silent as a well-kept secret. Gathering myself against the cold, I scooted from the bed, snatched Tub the Ted from the chair and jumped back into my warm nest. Hugging Tub, I prodded the hard bump of his growling mechanism and heard the comforting, thin roar. Suddenly I was embarrassed. I was nearly thirteen and I was cuddling a teddy bear. I dumped Tub on the floor. Childish thoughts.

How was I to know that was the last night of my childhood? Maybe if I had, I would have held Tub in my long, skinny arms all night long.

My wife, Sonja, is from a different world, a Nordic world of snow, soused herrings and long winter nights. She left that world when she was seventeen, her mind her passport; for her mind was, and is, so razor-sharp it would make minced meat of Ockham himself. Sonja could have studied anywhere -- MIT, Harvard, Oxford -- but the first time I saw her was at King's College, London. An ugly building which seems even now an unlikely place to find beauty. Yet it was there that I saw her for the first time, there that I first touched her hand and noticed nothing unusual. For she left me breathless, boneless and, eventually, she would argue, heartless. I managed, somehow, to speak, to form words and ask her where she was from, what she was studying, as her hand grew hot in mine. She frowned and looked at my lips, as I looked at hers. We smiled and knew then -- both of us -- that this meeting would last a lifetime. And so it has. It has lasted for the life-time since that moment. It has stretched over twenty years and I have never stopped loving the woman whose hand I first touched in that ugly building.
The first time I took Sonja down to Devon, to my mother's house in Thurlestone, it was a humid August night and we arrived to find her drunk, weaving slightly, her gestures clipped yet indefinite. The three of us sat in the library, searching for conversation as my mother fumbled with her glass, her cigarettes, her lighter. The air was heavy, made boxy by the static of an impending storm. When my mother went to the kitchen for a refill, I followed her and told her my news, told her why Sonja and I had come to visit. I knew my mother had spoken, knew she'd said something because the air moved.

'Sorry?' I asked.

My mother whirled round, furious, gripping a green gin bottle tightly by its neck. 'I said, "She may be beautiful but she's not right for you."'

I looked out at the volcanic arch, which shattered the horizon of the line between sea and sky. A dark slab of granite in the bay, sun blazing through its portal. `I can't believe that, Ma,' I tried to say but I must have only whispered.

My mother, her glass frosted by ice, smiled her wintry smile. 'You can't even talk any more.'

'I'm going to marry her.'

'Then you're a fool.'

'I love her.'

'Fine. Fine. Love her, then, go ahead and love her. But you don't have to marry her.' My mother scissored around the kitchen, sharp as a blade, picking up oddments and resetting them, slicing them, cutting them up or down and throwing them away. A lime was slashed and sectioned. She came to rest against the hard chrome edge of the cooker, holding her colourless drink against her chest, against her heart of stone.

I considered this. `I'll marry her anyway.'

I didn't hear Sonja's soft entry, in bare feet on a slate floor. It was my mother's flint-glance that made me turn to see Sonja watching me.

'Special, you don't have to,' she said, and smiled.

'But I want to.' When I said this my voice must have had a touch of amazement: how could it be that anyone would not want to marry Sonja?

My mother tapped me on the shoulder and reluctantly I turned away from Sonja to look at the lipstick-furred edges of my mother's mouth. It was the fine spray of saliva on my cheek -- as if she'd just stabbed the lime inches from my face -- that made me realise how angry she was. 'There's something wrong with her,' my mother said, gesturing at Sonja with the empty glass.

All these years later I can still feel the spray of my mother's spit and I rub it with my hand. But however hard I wipe, scrub my skin, however often, it's still there, that spray. Because she was right. There is indeed something wrong with Sonja, there always was.

I'm eight years old and I'm standing in the middle of a living room in a shabby Victorian house in Earl's Court, watching my mother, my beautiful, angle-poised mother, grabbing other people's waists, swaying and screaming with delight, swilling drinks (no change there) because the score is 2-2. Then suddenly it's 3-2 and my mother is crying, which is fine because she rushes over to me, kneeling right by the screen, and colourless sloe-scented drink spills down my front as she hugs me while the commentator bawls, 'This is a heart-stopping moment!' Well, it certainly was for me because all I could do was glance down at my scrawny chest and wait for my heart to stop. I watched everyone in the room as they danced, spilling Watney's Red and cheap plastic-bottle red wine. I was watching for their hearts, and as I sat right next to the television, which was blaring in my ear, I heard someone yell, `They think it's all over... It is now!' And when I turned round it was to see a ball ballooning into the net as if it were itself an overblown heartbeat.

The first time I touched Sonja, really touched her, was in her bed in halls, the only place I felt safe then. She put my hand on her bare breast and smiled. Looked at me and said, 'Burgundy wine.'

'What?'

'Wine. Your hand.'

'I don't get it.'

'You don't have to.'

'Right.'

Three weeks later I stood in my mother's kitchen and told her that I was going to marry Sonja and my mother said that there was something wrong with Sonja. That stormy night, after my mother had staggered to bed, we sat out on the deck with a bottle of red wine and I found out what it was.

Sonja told me then that she is a synaesthete: someone who tastes colours, sees music, feels sound, hears pictures, smells temperature. Her senses have mingled; they play randomly with each other. One sense is stimulated and another receptor stretches, like a dog on a hot pavement, and replies.

'What? Like thinking Wednesday is blue and six? Monday is yellow and three? That kind of thing?'

'No, not like that.' She frowned and wrapped her arms round herself. 'Not like that.'

'Like what, then?'

'What you're talking about is to do with language and experience. You're responding to words, labels, and your experiences of them. Everyone has colours they prefer, numbers they like -- maybe because of their shape or something.' She reached for her glass of wine as lightning razzled across the bay, making cliffs and beach jump purple. 'I mean like that -- the sky changes and I taste sour lemon. I see the flash and I taste lemon.' She looked away from me, out to sea. 'When it's really bad I don't even see the lightning, I just taste lemon.'

'Jesus Christ.'

She wakes to the alarm on Monday mornings tasting peaches, she listens to opera and sees John Martin's vast canvases. She eats spaghetti and her hands tingle as if a bolt of silk is being pulled through them. Eating in a restaurant is always an interesting experience.

'How was your fish, madam?'

'Wonderful, like aluminium.'

Sometimes it's worse than other times. Sometimes she can't function very well because her vision, her interpretation, of the world is so at odds with the rest of ours. Most of the time it's not so bad. She says that she would rather be a synaesthete than colour blind. But, then, she was always an optimisticsynaesthete -- as I realised when she described my touch as being burgundy wine. And now I understand what she means: my touch is not like burgundy wine, it is burgundy wine.

I remember looking out at the volcanic arch and thinking, Well, that's just fine.

Twenty years is a long time; it used to be a generation. Sonja and I have lived half our lives together. And all around us people have failed at the one thing they wished to do well -- to love someone and to stay with them. So simple. So why is it that over the years friends have come to us in pieces, fragmented wrecks, and cried in front of us, as Sonja makes pictures of their words and I watch their faces and their mouths work? We have always been the constant, the given, the exemplar.

Sonja and I don't have children. I'm not sure when we made that decision; I'm not even sure if it was a decision, a choice. I don't know. I woke up one day and realised we were both forty and childless, realised that all we had was each other. Which was enough for me because if children had arrived they would have brought change and disturbance with them. Our lives would have been bent out of shape, twisted by unfamiliar uncertainties and unexpected fears. Besides, I've never been quite sure what fatherhood means.

I am a carpenter. I shape wood so that it will fit together one way or another, and I sometimes think my mother's disappointed that this is what I do. I left King's College after a year and trained for a City and Guilds diploma. One Friday afternoon I climbed on my motorbike and drove to Sonja's halls of residence, swerving and listing violently at high speed, because I wanted to get to Sonja. (I have always wanted to get to Sonja.) I burst into her room, wearing sawdust-covered dungarees and a motorcycle helmet and asked her to marry me and she said she would. Her friends exclaimed, talked of the romance of what I had done. I didn't have the heart to tell them it wasn't romance; it was loneliness that prompted me.

And now I'm a carpenter in Bristol. I'm not sure how I journeyed down these two decades to arrive here in a huge house with more money than I have time to spend. How did this happen? Sometimes I feel my life is like a vast sieve: pour in time and effort, shake, and a cloud of money drifts out. You entertain thoughts such as this if you live with a synaesthete. Nothing is like anything else and yet everything is like something else. A handful of raspberries is the sound of rain falling; the smell of diesel is the sour taste of fried okra.

One evening, many years ago, I sat in the garden of the Highbury Vaults pub, kneading the calluses on my hands, thanking some deity or other for the evening sun, and I began to talk to the man sitting next to me. This was Ian, a metal-worker, a man of steel, a colossus, so muscle-bound I wanted to repot him, to put him in a bigger body, a more accommodating body. I have since always been fearful that he will burst out of his own. He asked me what I was doing at the time, and I told him I was building a deck. He flinched (I half expected his skin to peel open) and said that he was doing the same. We had a few more pints and sketched some ideas on paper. At the end of the evening, when we stood and shook hands, I realised Ian was only an inch or so shorter than me. Absurdly this pleased me, made me trust him. Three weeks later Elemental was born. What else would we call our company? He wrought iron and I shaved wood. Elements. Fashioned elements. And now we build decks for people who can afford them -- and they are many -- in Bristol and Bath.
It was when we moved into the studio flat in Battersea, just after we were married, that Sonja decided it was time I learned to cook. She'd spent her childhood eating fish in its various guises and was fascinated by the abundance of food in London's shops. Every Saturday morning we'd go walk-about, Sonja armed with a shopping list, and she'd point out fresh ginger, lychees, clemenvillas and asparagus, sharon fruit and Jerusalem artichokes. She tried to show me how to select the best but this wasn't always successful. My huge hand would wrap round an avocado and in the act of squeezing it gently I'd reduce it to green pulp. We'd buy pork belly and calves' liver, venison and guinea fowl -- anything but fish. Then over to Fulham and she'd trawl the Italian delis for balsamic vinegar, pancetta and Parmigiano.
Early Saturday evenings, when a bottle of wine had been opened, we'd begin the lesson in the tiny galley kitchen. Sonja skipped the basics like poaching eggs or roasting a chicken. Instead she cut straight to lemon poussins [i]persillades[r], guinea fowl with grapes, fresh tagliatelle with egg and truffle. She tried to show me how to fillet, skin and slice but I only ever ended up slicing myself. The kitchen was so small that I'd stand pressed up behind her, watching over her shoulder as we became increasingly distracted by contact and eventually the lesson was abandoned.

I loved those Saturdays, walking hand in hand down new streets, bags full of wild, unfamiliar food on our backs. Stopping for coffee, watching people marching past as we ate lunch and talked about decorating the flat or where we'd spend the summer. Every Saturday was like a holiday, a present.

When I was a boy -- when I was Merboy -- all schoolchildren had to take the eleven-plus, the exam that separated the stupid from the intelligent, separated the children who'd have a good life from those who wouldn't. Or, at least, that was how we thought of it. I walked into the classroom one morning and Mr Plunkett, who had a hooked nose and a voice like a foghorn, was laying out papers on the desks.

'Player, put two of these out for each child,' he brayed, giving me a box of pencils. 'And get a haircut soon.'
'Yes, sir.' I followed him round the room, doling out the pencils. 'Sir, is this the exam?'

'Don't ask questions, just do what I asked.'

'Yes, sir.' I carried on, thinking that he hadn't asked, he'd told me; thinking that I wanted to be somewhere else; thinking that I knew my mother wanted me to pass this exam.

Other children began to straggle into the classroom, and I saw some of them turn pale as they realised what the papers were because even then we all knew what it meant: grammar school or secondary modern. Success or failure. We all sat at the desks, alphabetically for once, and when Mr Plunkett called for silence the only sound I could hear was Martin Sawyer, two seats behind me, breathing snottily through his snaggle-toothed mouth.

That lunchtime we stood in tight groups, talking about the questions, not running and shouting, playing football or tag or British Bulldog. Martin Sawyer edged up to me.

'Some of them are tricks, y'know, to catch you out,' he said nasally. 'Like the one about the pound of feathers and pound of lead.' He was scraping at the asphalt of the playground with his shoe. ''Sobvious it's a trick -- 'sgot to be the feathers that's heavier.' He looked up and caught me smiling and his face flushed pink under his sallow skin.

Sonja and I went to Paris for our honeymoon -- but we might as well have stayed at home since just about all we did was make love all day and night, stopping only to call room service. I lay on the lumpy, unfamiliar mattress the first night, my feet and ankles hanging over the end, unable to sleep. The heat was stifling and even with the long, shuttered windows wide open the air, coloured by the smell of garlic from the restaurant opposite, lay on me as heavily as a blanket. I was thinking of my mother sitting alone on her deck, no doubt thinking of me. I felt I'd cut myself adrift from her, felt that she was receding already in my mind, a well-known island slipping over the horizon. I hated my mother for not loving Sonja and I loved my mother for many reasons. I was twenty years old -- too young to forgive her for not loving and old enough to feel fear for her. Because I knew that she'd sit alone for ever on her deck, drinking whisky and looking out over the sea, wishing things could have been different. All that week, as Sonja and I explored each other's bodies, occasionally dragging ourselves out to walk the streets and eat, I was aware of my mother's ghost, not walking beside me but sitting beside her. A young, beautiful ghost, a different woman, who -- I discovered many years later -- didn't exist.

When I was Merboy I lived in a cottage overlooking a creek in Noss Mayo, in Devon. One day when I was eleven, after the bus had dropped me at the top of Back Road, a group of boys came out of the garden of a house nearby, looking sly and brutal. I knew them, knew they were dangerous, slow-witted and vicious. I began to trot down the steep hill towards the creek, my bag bouncing on my back, as they lurched behind me, cat-calling. I jogged on, the gradient hurting my knees, the thought of swimming in high-tide waters pulling me down the hill, knowing I could easily out-sprint the bullies. Then one of them, Martin Sawyer, thin as a bulrush with buck teeth and acne, who thought that a feather was heavier than lead, yelled, 'Who's yer mother been fucking today, then?' The question flowed down the valley, through the open stable-door of my mother's cottage, across the dog-leg of the river and over the sea as Eddie Lamble, fat half-wit, wheezed his approval.

'It ain't yer father, is it?' Eddie Lamble crowed, his voice like sour milk.

Drawing level with the church, my breath jolting out of me, I could see the river filling the creek but I stopped running. I turned back to face the pack and shrugged off my bag as they thundered towards me.

The sound of Martin Sawyer's nose breaking was extraordinary -- the shattering of a pane of glass hidden in a pillow.

Bristol is a city calling for, in fact querulously demanding, decks. Unlike Rome it has more than seven hills; it seems to have an endless number of them, as many as anyone could possibly require. I have staggered up St Michael's -- known as Cardiac Hill because of the conveniently placed hospitals -- with a belly full of Smiles' Best. I have toiled up Totterdown and, on occasion, sweated my way up Ashton Court Road to Pill. I have even dragged myself up Constitution Hill, drunk at Christmas midnight, when the street was iced over, by hauling myself up on car bumpers. I was feet from my goal when my hand slipped on the steel bumper of an old blue Triumph Herald and, buttery-safe drunk as I was, I slithered down the length of the hill, spinning and giggling, clutching at ice-sleek cars, my coat snagging and tearing. I hurtled through Jacob's Wells and came to rest at the foot of Brandon Hill, fitting neatly into the deep gutter. I lay there stunned and stared at the stars.

It was on Constitution Hill that I built my first deck, a simple, ham-fisted affair. Cheap Malaysian rubber-tree wood, artlessly devised to hold the weight of a stout family as they sunned themselves after Sunday roast. It was a neighbour who saw that pitiful effort and asked me to do the same at the back of his house. If a city is perched on hills, if it boasts shaming wealth built on blood, slaves and tobacco, then decks are good business. A long-windowed Georgian house of two storeys, even-eyed and finely balanced from the street, will be four storeys at the rear. Dropping down with a vertiginous swoosh to an untended garden. How pleasant, how convenient, to have a deck at the kitchen level. This was the notion that seeped into my addled brain as I lay in the gutter at the bottom of Constitution Hill. I didn't know then that it would make me rich and lazy and heartless.

How did I become heartless?

Ian is talented and accomplished. His manners are fine and considered. He can wrestle single-handedly with a set of iron spiral steps, speak French and Italian, he can even do sign language; he can sail, windsurf, play the harmonica and cook. He is handsome and cultured; he is also lonely. We go out every Friday night from work and drink in different pubs because Ian doesn't like to stay in one place for the evening. He thinks that if he keeps moving he increases the chance of meeting the One. Well, maybe. I met the One twenty years ago and I wasn't even looking. I sometimes wonder what people think of us as we sit there, gesturing unexpectedly, me looking like a wild man, the shavings caught in my beard falling occasionally into my beer and Ian with the black-silk dust of iron-working leaving his dark, coffee-coloured face raccoon-like.

Sonja owns a delicatessen off Whiteladies Road, a beautiful, labyrinthine shop full of foreign mysteries. Much like Sonja herself. The delicatessen spreads through the ground floor of a beautifully proportioned Georgian house, fluted pillars with acanthus-wreathed capitals supporting a portico above the customers as they enter. They can tie their dogs there, on one of the pillars. Sonja has had a brass cleat fixed in the restoration mortar and puts out a terracotta bowl of water for the dogs, who gather in numbers, forming a maypole of tangled leads fanning down to the water.

I know this because I often pass the shop on the way from one job to another. If the traffic lights are red I can watch her move in her space, dressed in a dazzling white apron, her doubting grey eyes scanning the delicacies as if she's never seen them before. I never try to attract her attention, I just sit in the truck watching her. I have eyes like a hawk. I can see that the wild boar sausages have gone up from #3.75 to #4.15 a pound. Outrageous.
When we first moved here to Bristol Sonja began to study for a Ph.D. in psychology. Then one evening, six years ago, she came down to my workshop in the basement and announced that she was bored by study, by her life of libraries and libidinous lecturers. She wanted to deal in something concrete.

'Concrete?' I asked, pulling at a jammed router bit.

'Yes. Something in the world.'

My hand slipped and the razor edge of the bit sliced the ball of my thumb. 'You don't have to work. Do whatever you want to do.'

'I want to do something in the real world.' She moved to a stool, picked up the rusty jack saw on the seat, and sat, holding it in her hands.

'Something to do with concrete?' I sucked the blood hard and pressed my undamaged thumb against the cut. Sonja ignored the blood -- a commonplace hazard of butchers and manual workers.
'No. I mean something I can hold, something that's corporeal.'
'Right.'

'Something where there's some of me in it.'

'Right.' I grabbed a towel and wrapped the wound.

'I want to open a delicatessen. How much money do we have?'

I looked at her beautiful, unexplained face in astonishment. Cerebral Sonja asking about money? 'A lot.'

'Enough to buy a shop?'

'Depends where.'

'Whiteladies Road.'

'Right.'

'So can I do that? I can look into it?'

'I don't know. You haven't told me how much it'll cost.'

She mouthed a figure so colossal, so alarming, that I dropped the towel. 'Bugger me!'

'It's beautiful.'

'So are you and looking at you is free.'

'Ah, come on, Special -- be serious. I really want to do this. OK, I've been studying and you've been working, but who ever said that the two weren't the same? They're both work. I'm just so bored with university. I feel like I'm marking time, not going anywhere.' She dropped the jack saw and dust flew from the floor as she walked back up the basement steps and closed the door, stirring dust in eddies.

'Right.' It was Harry who had infected me with this verbal tic, this catch-all word, 'right'. I've never shaken it off.

When my bleeding thumb had staunched, I went upstairs and lay on one of the sofas, a deep, comforting yet lonely bed. I lay and watched car headlights scallop the ceiling. We did have the money, I knew that. She could have her beautiful shop and fill it with delicacies. But there was the rub. Something she could hold, she'd said? Jesus. She holds a tennis ball and thinks of custard; holds a Mont Blanc fountain pen and tastes copper; holds my hand and thinks burgundy wine. I mean, I was struggling -- a delicatessen run by a synaesthete? Eventually I slept fitfully, to be woken by daylight, and went to our bedroom. Sonja was sprawled across the mattress, a sheet dangling from one foot, the cotton fabric lapping like milk on the carpet in the dawn light. As I say, live with a synaesthete and the world is no longer your own. It becomes an ocean of experience into which we dip, hoping that what we reel in bears some relationship to what others feel.

I touched her heel and she groaned. 'We have the money, honey. Buy it today.' I watched her wake up, watched her encounter her world. It was a Tuesday morning. Was she tasting opals? Hearing mustard seas? Seeing calypso? Who knows? It takes Sonja a long time to connect to the world as we know it. She has a lot of data to rearrange.

She turned to me and smiled, her hand reached out to touch mine and my heart missed a beat. Literally. Missed. A. Beat. There was an absence in my chest. 'I love you, Special,' Sonja said, smiling. And my heart stopped.

Ian and I are both amazed by success. It was not what we sought when we set up Elemental. Of course, we wanted it to work, we wanted to do the things we did best every day -- wringing iron and shaving wood. But the degree of success has astounded us. There aren't enough hours in the day, there aren't enough experienced, talented iron-workers and carpenters, and there are too many rich, demanding customers. Our work has featured in trade magazines and Sunday papers, in lush, thick coffee-table books about house restoration and improvement. For our decks are not simply load-bearing, they are works of art. We began simply, with wooden rails, slatted floors and the occasional spiral staircase. But now the decks incorporate fused glass, granite, sand, driftwood, pebbles, columns, second storeys, movable sections. They are a melange of cedar, pitch pine, hazel pine and teak; mahogany and walnut, elm and lime. I have supplies of purple- and green-heart delivered from the West Indies for decoration. Ian and I comb restoration yards for materials of terracotta and Bath stone, rusted metal and chains. We once built a deck with the pitch pine planks from a Scottish brewery supporting a pulpit and curved rail from a Welsh Methodist church. Let it not be said that deck-builders are without humour. We have even built a deck with a glass floor, on the third storey of a Victorian building in Charlotte Street. What, I wonder, do the people in the garden flat below see when they go out to look at the stars?

Ian delights in linguistics, revels in the intricacies of language, and every week he adopts an orphaned word. Perhaps he likes the sound of it, or the shape of it, and he tries to worm it into every conversation he has. It can be anything -- propinquity, jurisprudence, flotsam, banjaxed, jinxed, neoteny -- and he'll use it whenever he can. He says, and I think he's right, that we don't use our language, don't explore it. He says we'll all soon be reduced to five hundred words, mere grunts expressing simple desires, Riddley Walker-like. His word for this week is 'incandescent', which strikes me as being a bit too work-related.

The moment my heart stopped I loved Sonja more than I'd ever done. Merely touching her ankle had undone me. She reached out for my hand and my heart stopped. I can remember feeling as if the ball had hit the net again, as if Geoff Hurst had kicked that glorious shot into my chest and the ball was ballooning through me. That is the last thing I remember. Apparently I keeled over like a felled oak, like Lincoln's cherry tree, like a Californian redwood -- which seems an appropriate response for a carpenter to have when his heart stops. My next thought was entertained in a bed in hospital. I can't remember what the thought was but I think it was that I was hungry. Sonja was sitting next to my bed holding my hand and I have always been convinced that she'd never let it go. She just smiles when I suggest this.

'What happened?' I asked.

'Your heart stopped.'

'Bollocks -- I'm thirty-five years old. How can I have a heart-attack?'

'It wasn't a heart-attack. It just stopped beating regularly. Something to do with electrical impulses.'

Her eyes were greyer than I'd ever seen them. I realised that she hadn't slept. 'How long have you been here?'

'I don't know.'

'Go home and sleep.'

She cried at last, her head resting on my malfunctioning chest, and I could feel all her movements with an intensity I'd never felt before and haven't since. It was as if I had slipped into her body. I felt like pulped breadfruit, crushed chestnuts, pale and malleable, and I understood at last what it was to see the world as she did. 'Sonja, Sonja.' I lifted her head with my catheter-snaky hand and her water-washed eyes stared. 'I'm not going to die. I'm not going to leave you. I am not going to die. Go home and sleep.' She believed me and so she went.
Embedded in the wall of the heart are four structures that conduct impulses through the cardiac muscle to cause first the atria and then the ventricles to contract. These structures are the sinoatrial node, the atrioventricular node, the bundle of His and the Purkinje fibres: the pacemaker mechanisms. It was, apparently, my bundle of His that was causing a problem, short-circuiting the whole shooting match. So they cut my broad, hairy chest right open and put in a pacemaker, a small, shiny dumb-bell of metal. Ian could have made me one sporting curlicues and roundels. Now my sinoatrial node and bundle of His (whose? someone else's?) sit there, unloved and bypassed. Sometimes I wonder if that is why I'm heartless.

Ian came to visit me in the hospital, his face grave and concerned, wiped clean of sweat and iron dust. He laid his huge hand on my chest and when he spoke my thorax vibrated.

'How you doing, Special?'

'Feeling like shit.'

He nodded and produced a bag of tiny kumquats. 'Thought you might be.'

'What's the word for this week?'

'Homeostasis. Difficult to work into a conversation down the Miners' Arms without you there.' He smiled and bit into a kumquat, the fine, minuscule zest spraying my face, reminding me of my mother.

I have conjectured for half my life, since that moment when I touched Sonja's hand at King's College, about her origins. I know she was born in Estonia, that she is Nordic, but she doesn't seem to belong to the north of the world. She generates warmth as if her core is burning; her skin feels bronzed, smells of soft toffee. Where is she from? What journeys did her ancestors make? Did they climb the Himalayas and take the direct route, through Pakistan and Uzbekistan, through the swampy heartlands of Russia to Estonia? Or were they romantic stargazers, taking a leisurely, ten-generation stroll along the coasts and waterways of two continents? And as they wandered what made them move on? Move north? Weren't there enough olives, fish and wild boar? What made them toil north through ever colder lands to fetch up in Kingisepp on the island of Saaremaa?

Sonja doesn't care about all this, she shrugs and changes the conversation if I mention it. I'm not fanatical about genealogy, merely curious, fanciful. I'm a Celt, hammered out of the tin mines of Cornwall and the coal mines of Wales. I have black hair and beard, periwinkle eyes and a table of a chest, a barrel of a body. I could beat back a band of Picts and still have time for breakfast. But, as the playwright Robert Bolt would say, a bitch got over the wall somewhere, for I have olive skin which tans in a moment. There must have been a gypsy or an Italian count who dallied in Dyfed or Kernow.

As I say, I'm not fanatical, merely curious because I'm a product of the land on which I live. After all, I'm only three generations from smallholding, goat-tending and tipping my cap. Around me there are fellow Celts, even in this cosmopolitan city. Recently in a gorge near Bristol there was a fall in a cave, soft limestone sloughing down beneath stalactites, to reveal a skeleton, supplicant and long dead, tens of thousands of years old. The gorge is remote, even now, small-town and landlocked. The people who know how to prised the DNA of this long-dead man from his body and took samples from everyone in the nearby villages. They found a perfect match, a shy, diffident school-teacher whose face almost exactly mirrored a projected mask of the dead man. I told Sonja about this and she shrugged and changed the conversation.

When the taxi brought me back from the hospital, pacemaker pulsing silently in my ribcage, my chest hurt. The scar prickled, my ribs felt tender and my heart ached. Ever since I was a boy I'd worried about my heart breaking -- I'd never given a thought to it aching and had certainly not imagined it stopping. I sat in the cab and watched Sonja in our front garden, wielding secateurs and trowel, rummaging in a black bin-bag, digging and delving. Her hair was pinned up and she wore a sarong. She turned when I opened the cab door, looking guilty and doubtful (looking like the daughter of a tribe who had crossed two continents). Seeing me she smiled, came to the car and hugged me, fussing over bags and payment, before leading me into the house. Hours later, after we had made very gentle love, after we had taken tea, after I had looked at my post, I went into the garden alone as she ran us a bath. I opened the bin-bags she'd filled and found in them the butchered remnants of every bleeding-heart plant we had.

I wonder sometimes whether Sonja's synaesthesia is a side effect of her family's peregrinations. Perhaps they saw so much that was new, tasted so much that was different, heard so many sounds previously unheard by them, that they carried with them a sensory overload they couldn't name. This is what's difficult with synaesthesia. It has to be described in language because there are no other tools. Even Microsoft Word doesn't have a toolbar that reads 'language, thesaurus, synaesthesia', and if it did what would it say? 'Monday -- peaches', 'Brandy -- Rodin's Kiss', 'Volcano -- hand running over dead coral'? Even then it would be only one synaesthete's version of the world.

Sonja once entertained some fellow synaesthetes here and I watched from the kitchen window, feeling furtive, as Sonja served wine and snacks. Then she called me out to join them on the deck and I sat for a while with six people whose worlds matched no one else's, not even each other's. They laughed as they bit into tortillas and talked of deserts and ceramics, snickered as they sipped Chablis and heard 'La Wally', felt wet sand, smelled tamarinds. Overwhelmed, I made my excuses and went to lie on our bed. Hours later Sonja joined me.

'Are you OK?' I asked. 'Have they gone?'

'Yes, they've gone. And no, I'm not OK.'

'Why not?' We didn't touch, just lay there, looking at each other. I know more than most how important it is to watch people as well as listen.

'They don't see things like I do.'

'Well, honey, you knew that would be the case. You knew that before you asked them here.'

'I know that. I know that. But I guess I was hoping that one of them would feel the same. Would name the same things. Like the guy with short blond hair? When he tasted the wine I was sure he'd say something about straw -- it was awful by the way -- but what did he say? It reminded him -- that's the received argot, it reminds one -- of zoysia grass. Bloody zoysia grass. I've never even seen the stuff.'

'I bet one of your ancestors did.'

'There you go again.' She turned on her back and crossed her arms on her chest, the same pose as the skeleton revealed in Cheddar Gorge.
One of our customers once asked Ian and me to design and build a deck shaped like a boat; he said he wanted it to be a deck, as it were. He'd been a sailor all his life and couldn't imagine a life on land without a railing and a curved, planed, interlocked floor. His house was out in the country, sliding down the banks of a river, so we built out over the high-tide mark. The deck curved round from the sides of the house, the railings made from old, reclaimed banisters with beautifully turned spindles. Ian contacted a boat-builder and we stripped out the deck of a yacht that was being broken up, and installed the floor so that it dipped away neatly to drain the rainwater. The customer wanted rigging and pulleys installed so we strung these round the edge. He could even run up a pennant on the short mast we slotted into the floor, should he feel so moved.

One afternoon as I was rummaging through the reclamation yard in Wells I came across a bowsprit maiden, faded and unloved in the corner of a shed. She had wild, slightly crossed eyes and the pale blue cloak falling from her shoulders revealed, sadly, only one breast, reminding me of Ellen. But she was a maiden and she deserved better than to be tossed in a corner and forgotten. I took her home, sanded her down and arranged to have her vacuum-treated. Then I repainted her cloak and face, although nothing, it seemed, could correct her squint. I repaired the deep crack that ran through her navel and painted her with layer after layer of yacht varnish. I even tried to fashion a new breast for her having found a round of Caribbean purple heart among my off-cuts that was approximately the right size. I'd turn it on the lathe in my basement workshop then run upstairs to feel Sonja's breast, running back down to the lathe while the feeling was still hot in my hand. Sonja might be sitting at a desk doing her accounts, or standing by the Aga cooking, or watching TV, and when she heard my steps thundering up the stairs she'd lift her blouse or T-shirt and carry on cooking, or reading, or whatever. But the maiden's breast was never convincing. It simply didn't work. And long-drawn-out and enjoyable though the project was I had to abandon it. The reason, of course, was that Sonja's breast was full and ripe, made of flesh, while the maiden's was a Michelangelene attempt at a breast -- unaccountable to gravity, a half tennis ball stuck near her shoulder. Now that one-breasted bowsprit maiden stands proud on the prow of the deck behind the old sailor's house, looking out over the river rising and falling. Which may not have the marine drama of the Straits of Molucca or the fury of Cape Horn but at least it's something for her crazy eyes to watch.
A few months ago Sonja knelt before me as I was reading and touched my cheek.

'You're not talking enough,' she said, her eyes scanning my face in the same way as they scanned the morsels in the refrigerated displays in her shop. Doubtfully.

'What?'

'You're not talking enough. You're retreating.' She squatted down, in what I think of as her Indian pose, and said, 'Tell me a story.'

'Which one?'

'Um...' she bounced on her haunches '...the one about the picnic and the lemonade.'

I smiled, despite myself, despite the fact I have told this story a million times, despite the fact I'm the victim. OK. So, I'm nine years old and my mother and I are in the cottage in Noss Mayo. We wake up one Sunday morning and the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the Yealm is running high. It is an Indian summer.' For a moment I wondered if Sonja understood more of Indian summers than I ever shall. 'Anyway, Mother takes it into her head that we're going to have a picnic. She boils eggs, cuts slices of ham and chicken, washes lettuce and tomatoes. We're all packed up with loads of little plastic containers and flasks and she's like a dynamo, thinking that's the way normal people live. As we're leaving the house I remember there's a bottle of Corona lemonade in the fridge. I ask if we can take it and she says we can but only if I carry it. So I go and get it. You don't know the bottles but when I was a kid Corona lemonade was the thing. More than Coke or Pepsi. It came in a heavy, dimpled glass bottle with a striped white and yellow label. And the bottle had deposit paid _ you had to give one in every time you bought a new one or you didn't get a discount.

'So I grab the bottle and go into the road where Mother's waiting. She's just a ray of sunshine, calling out to the neighbours and waving as we load up the old Morris Minor. She's taken it into her head that she wants to go to Thurlestone and she cruises really slowly past a huge house looking out over the arch in the bay. She points, just like she always does when we go there, and says, "There, pumpkin, is my favourite house in the whole world. Imagine waking up to that view. One day, pumpkin, one day. I'd give anything to live there."'

I stopped speaking for a moment. Does my mother ever remember saying that? Does she ever turn that wish over in her mind?

'Anyway, we get out of the car and start walking down to the beach, across the golf course, and the links are really crowded, balls flying everywhere. All the golfers are yelling, "Fore!" and she covers my head and giggles as we duck down together. Then she's walking ahead of me because I begin to ramble, looking in rabbit holes, turning over stones, looking for lost golf balls. The sun's hot and I feel brilliant. My mother's happy as a sandboy, I'm going to go swimming and then I'll eat as much as I want, food I really like. I begin to flip the bottle in my hands. Y'know, just end over end, even though it's all slippery with sweat. I begin to throw it a little higher and then, as my mother disappears into the dunes, I fling it up into the air, even though the lemonade will fizz out when it's opened. I throw it up as high as I can, and then I look for it. Big mistake. The sun's at its highest, absolutely dazzling. I'm blinded by it and begin to reel about, arms flailing, as the bottle falls. When it lands it knocks me senseless.'

Sonja snorted with laughter, even though it was a picture of my younger self being damaged. I guffawed. `It took my mother five minutes to realise that I wasn't behind her. When she came back to get me she found I was knocked out and there was blood everywhere. We spent the afternoon in Plymouth's casualty ward, with me being given eight stitches. But as my mother said, rather brightly given she'd been at the wine in the ladies' room, at least we had enough to eat while we were waiting.'

Sonja grinned as I thought that my mother might have been annoyed that we lost the deposit on the smashed bottle.

'More stories,' Sonja said.

'No, no more.' I smiled, then, to take the sting out of the words. 'I'm tired.'

'OK. Thanks. You spoke really well.' Sonja pushed herself out of her Indian pose and kissed my cheek. 'Coming to bed?'

'In a minute.' I picked up my book and pretended to read until she closed the door.

When she'd gone, I dropped the book on the sofa, lowered my chin to my scarred, unnatural chest and thought. Unknown to Sonja, whenever I told that story I thought of another. I didn't know why it reminded me, maybe because when I was a boy I always thought my mother was so self-assured, beautiful and...proud, almost. But I knew that when I was six months old my mother went to Plymouth Central and caught a train to Bristol Temple Meads to look for my father, my Celtic, feckless, handsome father. Her husband. She went to the department store on Park Street where she'd found out he worked, and begged him to come back. She begged, my mother. My mother begged. And he said, 'No.' He stood in the shadow of the Victorian buildings on Park Street -- where I have since built decks, built bridges -- and he said no. I've never met him but I have seen photographs and I can imagine him forming the word 'No', spitting it out on the pavement.

It was Ellen, my mother's closest friend, who told me this charming vignette. She told me one afternoon when we were walking the beach in Thurlestone as my mother slept. I'd been complaining that my mother hadn't spent any time with us, that she'd just locked herself away in her room. Ellen stopped, caught my arm and pulled me round to face her.

'John,' Ellen said, 'let your mother alone. Give her some peace. She needs some time on her own.'

I was cold, I was fourteen, I was scared that my mother didn't love me any more. I lashed out. 'Why didn't she make my father stay?' I shouted, as sand whipped by January winds flew around us.

So Ellen told me how my mother had tried to do just that.

I'm forty years old now and I still haven't fathomed it. My father left my mother because he was worried that I'd be imperfect, that I might be deaf or blind or perhaps contorted, crab-like, with webbed feet. Is that sufficient reason? This is the question I ask myself all the time -- is it sufficient reason? The answer, just as his was, is 'No'. Because he left before I was even born. He left while I was being born, when my mother was in hospital giving birth. I arrived on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, with Scorpio rising to boot, yet even these auspicious signs couldn't persuade him to stay. As I was tussling my way into the world my father was packing his belongings and leaving and when my mother finally made it back to the flat, it was to find him gone. He did, however, have the good manners to return some materials he had taken that didn't belong to him. My mother, balancing me awkwardly on one hip, opened the package he had sent her and the first thing she found was a leaflet on family planning.

It was Ellen who told me this too and I know now she was trying to save me from wasting my life imagining I loved my father, imagining that he deserved to be loved. She failed but at least she tried.
I have many scars -- from the Corona bottle, from the various router bits, chisels and drills with which I have wrestled. I look at my body and map out my life by scars. But there are many scars I can't see.

It was months ago that Sonja asked me to tell her the lemonade story; since then she's been distracted, inattentive. Sometimes I see her, as I sit in my truck and she moves around her world; a world of Patum Peperium, Amaretto, Belgian truffles and Parma ham, bread still steaming from Herbert's in Montpelier. The deli does very well, despite my misgivings. Sonja has a handy knack -- she buys only cheese that makes her think of silver and burgundy, wine of silk, bread of mares' tail clouds, cold cuts of navy and cotton twills. I hadn't thought of that -- that the admixture of senses might be advantageous. But often now when I pass the shop she's not there. Where is she? She has always been the model manager, the first to arrive, the last to leave. She used to snatch her lunch in ten minutes in the stock room, maybe wolfing down a samosa or felafel followed by a slab of chocolate brownie. But now I can't see her when I look for her.

It took three men to pull me off Martin Sawyer's limp body all those years ago, as his blood dribbled slowly over the asphalt of the road in Noss Mayo. Eddie Lamble was long gone. I remember the sound of Martin Sawyer trying to breathe through his mouth, his lips swollen by my fists, as swollen as if they'd been stung by wasps. He looked up at me through closing, purple eyes and sighed and a bubble of blood burst beautifully in the gap between his front teeth, its filmy surface catching the afternoon sun.
Sonja's family are a brooding, blond bunch. I looked forward so much to meeting them, looked forward to impressing them. I wanted to be the attentive son-in-law, mature beyond his years, nurturing and supporting their daughter. They came to visit one Christmas, a couple of years after we were married, and Sonja and I collected them from the station in our second-hand Ford Cortina III estate. I pulled up in front of Temple Meads (trying not to think of the time, twenty-one years before, when my mother had arrived there, preparing herself to beg) and braked in astonishment. There were so many of them, and so many cases. They looked scared, alien in ill-fitting suits and dated skirts. Around them was a lake of luggage.
'Jesus Christ!' I turned to Sonja. 'Are they visiting or defecting?'

'It's the first time they've been away. Don't be rude.' But even she looked a tad glassy-eyed.

It took three trips to transport all the people and cases and boxes. I walked into our tiny flat with the last case and they were all standing in our box-like living room, touching things: ornaments, books, TV, pictures. I thought for a mad moment that they were all blind. Why else finger everything? One of Sonja's sisters, Olga, was even touching the walls, turning her fingers round the corners. I decided to take control, slapping my hands together and booming, 'Well, who's for a drink?'

They all stopped their fingering to look at me blankly before turning to Sonja to speak in their own language. I scanned their faces one by one, looking for recognition and found none, so I got a beer from the fridge and went to bed. Hours later Sonja joined me, quite drunk on vodka. She woke me by gently pulling the tip of my beard and kissing me, her tongue hot with lemon-scented raw alcohol.

'Well?' I asked.

'They like you, Special.' She held her hands up to admire the rings she wore -- a sure sign of drunkenness.
'How can they? They didn't even speak to me.'

'Well, they don't speak English.'

'Right.'

The next day I went to stay with Ian in his flat. We spent the day fishing at Chew Magna and now that's what I do whenever her family arrive: I make three trips to take them to our house and then I go to stay with Ian. We walk and work, have drinks and visit restaurants. We drive out to Hay-on-Wye, go down to Constantine Bay, maybe go camping in the Gower. It's an easy, silent relationship. Then, when it is time, I go back to the house -- which by now smells of black butter, fish and mushroom stew -- and run three trips to Temple Meads. Before they slip away, like blond wraiths, Sonja's family bow slightly stiffly towards me and I find myself bowing in return. This exchange is wordless -- how could it be otherwise?

One question always bothers me. When I looked at Sonja's family that first time I was struck by how bleached, how angular they all were. Yet Sonja is a luscious woman, with deep blonde hair and grey eyes, her body soft and curved. Did a dog get over the wall? I look at Sonja's mother and her flat, pale blue eyes slide away from my stare.

I've always enjoyed visiting Ian in his workshop; in fact, I go out of my way to drop in on him in his furnace-filled room on Cumberland Road. I like walking in and there he is, stripped to the waist, dripping with sweat, squinting and blinking as it runs into his eyes. He tips his visor on to his forehead, wiping his face with a cloth, and he looks as if he's been wearing the helmet of a diving suit made at the turn of the century, a heavy, curved mask in front of his face.

Today Ian pulls off the visor when I enter and glugs water from a bottle, looking at me strangely, almost speculatively.

'I came to pick up the plans for Hampton Road,' I say. He nods towards the desk and I rummage about among the hammers, bits and tongs until I find the papers. `When shall I tell her we can start?'

Ian shrugs, wipes his face with a rag. 'Next Wednesday?' He picks up a cold chisel and turns it in his hands.
'Special...'

'Yes?'

Ian stares at the blue flame hissing from the solder. 'Nothing. It's nothing.'
'You OK?'
'Yeah, I'm fine.' And I thought he said then, 'It's not me, it's you.' But his lips didn't move.

It was Sonja who taught me to dance. She pulled me to my feet one evening in our first tiny basement flat in Kingsdown, the deposit paid for by my second year of deck-building, and I stood foolish and bear-like as she put a record on the turntable. Then she turned to me and took my hands.

'Watch my feet.' She began to move, graceful and balanced.

I'd always loved to watch her dance but I had never thought to join her.

'Give me your hands,' she said, and took my callused hands in hers. She pulled me to her and guided me round the room. She smiled up at me and pressed herself against the length of my body. Gradually I learned to follow her, to mirror her movements as she danced to the music, to the rhythms.

'There,' she said, laughing, 'you can dance, you see?'

I felt stupidly accomplished, proud of doing something a five-year-old could do. That's how Sonja made me feel. We've danced through our life together: tiny, crab-like dances in our early flats and houses, then swirling across the vast polished floors of this house, from room to room, our feet synchronised, hands locked. I've sometimes wondered what people think as they glance in through the windows to see us swooping about, laughing and giggling.

But it doesn't matter now because we haven't danced for months. We haven't really even talked for months. My mind composes words, then the doubts I have about Sonja and her desires rush in, displacing those words, and I stay silent. Sometimes I think she's watching me as I stand with my back to her, making coffee, slicing bread, reading a letter. I think she's watching me and I don't know why.

I went to Cumberland Road again today. The tide was low and the riverbeds were thick with brown mud, stinking in the sun. It was early on the morning of the equinox, already too hot. Ian's door was locked so I found my little-used key and went in to look for the transformer to take over to Hampton Road. There was a note on the worktop, held down by a twisted lump of steel and as I reached for it a hollowness inflated in my heart. I paused, waiting for the feeling to pass, knowing it wouldn't. I took the note to the door to read it in the sunlight.
Special -- gone to Walcotts in Bath to collect the pillars for H. Road. Can you call Mrs Richards re the damage to the door? The team at Alma Vale Rd need 2 x 20m ext. leads. I tried to say it yesterday but couldn't. Maybe this is better -- I think Sonja's having an affair. Sorry. Ian
The hollowness was still there as I thought of the foundations dug out behind the house at Alma Vale, thought about having to go to Jewson's to buy the extension leads. I looked again at the diarrhoea mud of the riverbanks and I knew Ian was right.

I drove up Whiteladies Road, parked the truck on a double yellow line and stood looking at the delicatessen. The Labradors were bumbling about, plump bellies rubbing, tongues slapping at the water. Sonja was laughing with a customer as she wrapped a round of cheese and set the package on the counter. She turned and called out to an assistant and he laughed too. Sonja was glowing, content in her space. I realised I hadn't seen her laugh for an age; when she was with me she wasn't like this. She looked up, saw me and her face changed, doubt drowned her eyes.

A traffic warden tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to my truck. 'Is this yours?'

I nodded.

'You'd better move it.'

I shrugged and turned back to the shop to watch Sonja as he wrote me a ticket and slapped it on the windshield. He walked away, giving the waistband of his trousers a self-satisfied tug.

'How did you know?' I ask Ian, as we sit outside the Kensington, pints of Smiles' warming in late-afternoon sun.

'I drive around more than you do. I've often seen them together. I didn't think anything of it the first few times. Then it was obvious. I saw them outside Rocinantes and it was obvious. Something about the way they were sitting, the way they were talking. I don't know.'

'Well, who is he?'

'How the fuck do I know?' Ian is irritable because he is shamed by being the messenger.

'Shit.' My hands are shaking, and I touch the lemonade scar, bumpy and numb beneath my hair. I touch it to calm myself, a nervous tic that connects me to childhood. I realise I'm scared. 'I'm scared,' I say. 'I don't know what to do.'

'Ask her about it.'

'How can I ask Sonja that? She won't answer.'

'Ask her anyway.'

And of course I go home and say nothing. Any words I can conjure up seem unequal to the task of asking Sonja. So we sit in silence, reading, as the sun falls behind the house, leaving the deck in shade.
I'm sitting in Ian's car, staring at the pedestrians toiling up Park Street and along the Triangle. Some are laughing, walking arm in arm, and I wonder how they do that. How can they do that when I've forgotten how? Ian slows down and touches my arm. He says nothing but points across the road to Brown's and there's Sonja, sitting out on the terrace, at one of the brushed zinc cafe^/ tables, holding the hand of a blond, clean-shaven man.

'Stop!' I shout, and Ian swerves into the kerb, parks outside the JCR. We sit, saying nothing, watching my wife with another man. Even with her sunglasses on I'm aware of Sonja's grey eyes looking at him. There's something strange about the way he moves, the way he angles his head towards her, something awry about the way her hand drifts towards his and brushes it, guides it almost. They gather up bags and stand, their drinks finished, and a yellow Labrador hauls itself to its feet, shakes and looks up at the man, feebly wagging its tail. He feels for the clip on the dog's yellow jacket and takes hold of the harness.

'Jesus Christ,' I whisper, 'he's blind. He's fucking blind. What does she think she's doing?'

Ian shrugs his massive black shoulders. 'Well, you're deaf,' he signs.
Copyright (c) Jules Hardy, 2002