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suppose he must have held myhand before. Walking me to school. Taking me to the park. Did he ever do those things? Once upon a time? I had no memory of it. Maybe he had never done those things because he was working. This felt like the first time he had ever held my hand.
    ‘The pain will go,’ he said, and he squeezed my fingers, and gave them a gentle shake that meant, Be brave. And it didn’t feel like the first time that he had told me that.
    I closed my eyes and my dad kept holding my hand. I felt the sleep of the heavily drugged come sliding in, and still he held my hand.
    Then Lara and my mum came into the room with tea and coffee and I opened my eyes.
    ‘There he is,’ my mum said, as if I might have slipped out for a spot of bungee jumping while she was at the vending machine.
    And that was when I felt him let go of my hand.
    They wanted me to exercise. The doctors. The nurses. They wanted me up and about. They could see that I was becoming quite comfortable in that overheated bubble of my little room, regular food and affection being delivered to my bed as if I was a newborn. And that is not a million miles from what it felt like. The sheer fact of being here at all made me feel like laughing out loud.
    Because I should have been dead by now.
    But I was getting too attuned to the delights of daytime television. The recipes and rolling news and screaming family feuds. The hospital soaps and celebrity gossip. The fabricated drama of sport.
    Time to snap out of it. Time to start thinking about my rehabilitation programme and physiotherapy schedule.
    Time to take my first steps.
    And after a few practice shuffles around my room, I was pretty much given the freedom of the hospital. They didn’t have the time or the inclination to supervise me. They had sick people to worry about. They just got me out of bed and got my blood pumping. Then they let me get on with it.
    And that was how I discovered the roof.
    I walked down the hospital corridor, refastening the belt of my dressing gown, making it tighter, anxious not to expose myself in my stripy M&S pyjamas. I went past the nurses’ station to the far end of the corridor and caught the service lift to the top floor. Porters with big rubbish bags and little English went about their business in this lift, and greeted my presence with polite indifference. When I got to the top floor, and said goodbye to whichever porter was lugging his bin bags around, I took a few steep steps up to a door that was never locked in case of fire. And when I walked through the door there was the roof, there was the city, there was the world.
    Silence and the city’s eternal hum. Fresh air and car fumes. Solitude and all those lives that I would never know.
    The metal railing encircling the roof was so low that it made my breath catch, my head spin, my carpet slippers take a step back. Six floors below, the Marylebone Road flowed like a mighty river. I inhaled, smiled, and felt someone behind me.
    ‘Dad?’
    It was Rufus. I looked up at him. His eyes were red and his shoulders sagged. If it wasn’t for my dressing gown and stripy pyjamas, you might have thought that I was visiting him.
    ‘Looking on Google,’ he said, and his voice caught. He closed his eyes and composed himself. The sob settledsomewhere deep down inside him. ‘Me and Ruby. Reading about – you know. What happened to you.’ He closed his eyes. Controlled his breathing. And looked at his father. ‘Half of transplant patients are dead after ten years.’
    I smiled at him.
    ‘So that means half of us are alive.’
    His body twisted with discomfort. ‘Yeah, but…’
    ‘Don’t be one of those guys,’ I said, and it came out harsher than I wanted it to. ‘One of those glass-half-empty kind of guys.’
    We stood there awkwardly for a bit, the city flowing far below. Then he said that he might go back inside and I told him that was a good idea. I would be down in a while. All this without a second of eye contact.
    I