Chapter 4: Thirty-Three

Clement's flat was above a garage in Bermondsey, and it had one table, one lamp and no photographs.

I sat at the table that night with the breakfast menu from the Grand.

I had taken it off the stage when nobody was looking, and the back of it was blank.

"What are you doing?" Clement asked from the kettle.

"Counting."

I wrote a number one and next to it, stairs.

Six years ago, two months after Crispin proposed, I had tumbled down the back staircase at his mother's house and cracked my wrist.

Number two was a coffee urn at a charity lunch that tipped its boiling water down my arm.

Number seven, a cyclist who had come at me on the pavement.

Number eleven, a ladder at the auction house that slid from the shelves with me on it.

Number fourteen was the cottage in Dorset where we had gone to choose flowers, and the gas fire that went out in the night.

Number nineteen, a taxi door that opened into traffic.

I put my fingers to my left shoulder where that one had left a scar.

Number thirty-one was a loose stone on the cliff path in Cornwall.

The last was the car.

When I got to the end I turned the menu over and wrote the wedding dates down the other side.

I stared at the two columns for a long time.

"Every accident came in the fortnight before a wedding date," I said.

"Every one?"

"Every one. I never looked at the calendar. I was always too busy being hurt."