Okay, tell me, Bill says gently and he really does want to know if it is possible to love and be loved from such a hallowed place as your teenage years. It seems a long time since he was nineteen, he can only suppose times have greatly changed. But he is glad to have asked, seeing how her face shimmers with the thrill of the tale. The most significant development in the history of love has been the Internet, she tells him. This is how she met PJ, who has been so good for her confidence, always telling her she’s beautiful, letting her meet all his friends. He takes pictures of me, she tells him proudly, then blushes. His friends take pictures of me. I never thought I was anything special, but they say I could be a real model. It must be the light or something. You have to know how to use the light, right? She is giddy with a sudden thought. I feel like Cheryl Cole, sometimes. PJ knows the right people, and I can’t keep doing double shifts just to pay the rent, so maybe… and the pretty nurse with diamond skin stares past Bill into a dream of money and paparazzi fanning her door.
         This boy, Bill says slowly. How old is he?
         PJ? He’s not a boy. He’s forty three. And before you say it, it isn’t… some kind of syndrome. I know what you’re thinking. You know, like when you fall in love with your kidnapper. It’s not like that.
         Stockhausen’s? he says, taken aback. That wasn’t what I was thinking.
         Yeah, well, it isn’t Stockhausen’s.
         It’s love, right?
         Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Love.

         Now the surgeons are late. The midday wind rolls in and Ellen Hare, crossing the hospital car park to the waiting taxi, is reminded that winter is coming. Inside the light is low, the pumps suck and slide. The radio plays I don’t want to talk about it by Rod Stewart and Bill wonders how it is that all the songs you ever hear are about how hard it is to stop loving someone and never how impossible it can be to start. How you want to try but the fire won’t light, or maybe sometimes there is no way of really knowing yourself and your own desires and that is why Stephen Hopkins never realised what it was they had between them.

19

  

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