Extract from The Heart's Elliptical Orbit

Pulling him through these first days and weeks is a picture of the man he wants to become. Funy, fatherly, fit enough to play french cricket on the weekend and to be a husband to his wife again.

The itching is unbearable. New hair growing back on his thighs, chest and arms. Prickling the skin like nettle rash. A nurse called Angus Frear shaved him. Covered him in soapy water before running the blade up and down his body. They talked about football and snooker, but as the porters wheeled him down to theatre Saul felt like a woman.

Mattie rubs calamine lotion onto Saul's skin. He turns pink, smells like a child who has been out in the sun too long and can't sleep because the cotton sheet is unbearably heavy and hot. But there is a fascination too; the way the liquid dries and cracks. His body has become a desert and the slightest movement prduces a fault line.

Mattie sleeps on the right side of the bed, Saul on the left. They have not made love for two years. Saul could barely laugh without collapsing in a wheezing fit. An orgasm would have killed him. They are strangers to each other's bodies even though they live within inches of each other.

Saul lies still and straight in the bed. Mattie is restless. She listens to his breathing, checks his pulse occasionally. On the seventh night she slides her hand inside his hand and lets it linger there for a while longer than usual. Then she plants a kiss on his mouth, slow and seductive. Saul longs for he lips to touch all of him at once. His whole sore body spooned in the bowl of her mouth.

Hold me, he says.