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Catriona rubbing Tamara's shoulders, saying It's for the best. You did the right thing. Tamara nodding. Tamara turning. Tamara seeing some young thing. Tamara falling in love. Christ.
    I flicked through the rest of the book and noticed the address of Tamara's old bolthole in Amsterdam. I tried calling that too, but nobody was answering. I couldn't remember the name of the guy who lived next door, and the address book didn't give up any other Amsterdam addresses. Amsterdam , I thought. Why would she go there?
    I pocketed the rest of the change and drained my pint. I felt better. Positive action. It wasn't much, but I had made the first move; everything from here on in would be easier to decide upon, I thought. I felt a burning low in my chest. Acid reflux. Or my jigsaw ribs making themselves known. I could no longer tell when I was hungry. Too many other sensations jumped the queue. I ate according to the clock now and it was pushing on for noon.
     
    I stayed away from the beach that morning, despite an ache to return. There was something about the expansive skies that helped me forget myself for a while, stopped me from feeling so limited. But I stayed away because Ruth had asked me to. It wasn't just that she was right, but also because it felt good to do as someone said. Being responsible for an aircraft filled with people blunted your appreciation of a command structure. You took orders that had to do with the process of flying. You requested and were either granted or denied. It wasn't down to personality or reliance. It was mechanical, on any number of levels.
    I mooched about. I ate fish and chips. I read the papers. Three weeks after waking up, the world seemed no different to how it had been before my accident. One hundred and eighty nine days of people kicking footballs and arguing and fighting and killing and being rescued. Four thousand five hundred and thirty six hours of people watching TV and fucking and eating curry. Two hundred and seventy two thousand one hundred and sixty minutes of waiting for a bus and shopping at Tesco and wiping your arse. Sixteen million three hundred and twenty nine thousand six hundred seconds of watching somebody wither in Intensive Care.
    Ruth came home tired at lunch time. She ate soup and went to bed for a nap. She didn't feel much like talking, beyond: 'Another couple of weeks and that's me done. I can't cope with much more of that or the baby will suffer.'
    I welcomed the news. We could sit together on the sofa and watch afternoon films. I could help her eat whatever weird dietary urges her pregnancy demanded of her. It was important to find that groove again, that way of interacting with other people, develop a sense of belonging. I sensed that people brought me secrets to burn because of my detachment. I reeked of loner.
    I performed my exercises. Diaphragmatic breathing. Static quadriceps exercises. Pelvic tilting. Transversus abdominus. I bathed. The sky was crowding with clouds, high and thick and grey. A storm was pressing the air into the village. I opened the bathroom window an inch to let the steam escape and sat in my hot, sudsy well, feeling my muscles slowly untie themselves. I soaped my chest gingerly, despite everything there having healed some time ago. I felt fragile, like some wet piece of bone china handled by a butter-fingered child. My ribs felt dog-chewed. They had collapsed under the punch of the radiator grille. One of them had torn into my lung. I recalled some of the literature I'd been given at the hospital from the impressively titled Therapies Directorate. To be realistic you must give yourself two years to be the best that you can be.
    Cool air eddied through the mist from the bath. The bathroom mirror fluxed in stages of opacity. Ridges of clarity formed. I saw my ribs opened out like the claws of a giant crab. I saw the ruined seagull clatter into the red fist at its centre, beak stabbing and rending. Blood pinked the tip of it and the curled cone