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over to my bed to chat. Before his accident he’d worked for a travel firm, tailoring holidays for the retired. ‘I know it doesn’t sound that cool, organising holidays for old folk, but it’s a real niche market,’ he’d said with bright eyes. ‘We organise loads of guided tours, mainly in Europe.’ The travel company have kept him on, no doubt because they love his attitude and energy. Guy was another story altogether. I gathered from Dom that he had worked in the City. Guy sulked, refused to do his exercises and shouted at the nurses, saying his life was fucking over so why should he do his fucking exercises. However, each time he swore he’d apologise to me and I’d smile back, hoping that that was the end of our conversation.
    Dom was the only patient in our ward who had the nerve to persevere with Guy. ‘We’re all in the same boat,’ he’d claim, except that wasn’t strictly true. Guy’s injury at the C6 level is worse and carries with it a lot more complications.
    However, Dom is someone who will not give up. Finally Guy broke down when Dom had insisted on singing Monty Python’s song, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’.
    ‘Will you stop being so fucking perky all the fucking time!’
    There was this long painful silence that was broken when the entire ward laughed, including Guy. After that moment something changed within him; a small light had been switched on. That was also the beginning of Dom’s nickname, Perky.
    Gradually Guy joined Dom and me for supper in the evenings. Initially Dom and I did all the talking although I was aware that Guy listened to every word. I could see he had trouble holding his knife and fork so sometimes he ate his baked beans with a large spoon. We talked about our accidents; it’s impossible not to since they haunt you day and night. Dom had finished work, got on his motorbike, and the next thing he knew, he was lying face down on the tarmac. ‘My back tyre blew. I torture myself thinking, what if I had taken the bend slower? What if, what if?’
    I told them about that morning with Sean in our flat in Pimlico. All I was doing was getting some breakfast. I wasn’t concentrating; it was one mistake that had cost me this. ‘No one else was hurt,’ I confided. I also told them about my student days at King’s and Sean writing me a letter. Neither said a word. Deep down I could hear Guy thinking he’d have probably left me too, and I sensed Dom felt guilty that Miranda was unflinching in her support. If anything she loved him even more.
    ‘I remember waking up in my car,’ Guy said and Dom and I nearly choked on our food. ‘I had this pain in my neck.’ And after that moment Guy didn’t stop talking. He told us that he had been driving back from a party in the early hours of the morning when his car hit a tree. It had taken the ambulance men six hours to get him out of the front seat. They’d had to cut the car’s roof off. He had been as dependent as a baby for the first few months in hospital.
    His voice was shaking. I felt unnerved by the pain in his dark eyes but I was glad he was talking, and he had Dom to thank for this breakthrough. It was as if, since his accident, his mind and body had shut down completely and finally he was beginning to come out of the coma.
    ‘They don’t mince their words in here, do they?’ Dom said during one of our evenings.
    ‘Doctors are arseholes,’ Guy said. ‘Most of them, anyway.’
    ‘I can’t see you being like them, Cass,’ Dom added. ‘I have to say, I was pretty cheesed off when they told me I wouldn’t be able to walk again.’
    ‘You posh sod,’ said Guy. ‘I went fucking mental. Sorry, Princess.’
    ‘Don’t worry.’ I handed round the jam tarts that Dad had brought in for me.
    ‘I thought if you broke your neck you died,’ Guy continued. ‘I thought people in wheelchairs were born like that. Fucking hell – sorry, Cass – I had no idea I could end up like a cabbage. The doc says,