‘Okay. Next time you’ll have to let me buy you more than a bottle of water.’

  I smile at the promise of next time.

  As we’re leaving, the man who was seated behind me violently pushes his chair back, crushing mine, and stands up. He starts thumping his chest as though he’s in church, bellowing an admission of guilt and sinfulness.

  ‘Christ, they’re all out today. You dodge the crazies like Muhammad Ali dodges jabs,’ Andy remarks.

  ‘They’re always out. You just have to know how to see them,’ I say.

  ‘But why can’t I touch you?’ Andy says.

  ‘You are touching me. I’m naked, you’re naked, I’m on you.’

  He looks at me, those eyes, and I hate that I don’t know what he’s thinking. Probably that I’m a freak. A few dates in and he’s already discovered it.

  ‘If you don’t want to do it like this, then we won’t,’ I say. I climb off him.

  He pulls me back. ‘I do. But we’ve done it your way. Now let’s try it my way. Trust me.’

  I find myself moving slowly down onto the bed, the sheets heated by the sunlight through the window. His lips kiss my neck, he takes my hands and folds his fingers over mine. I’m used to doing it my way, the way I’ve always done. The less bodily contact the better. I don’t want, or need, to feel everything my partner’s feeling in this moment, nothing is ever 100 per cent passion, everything has roots in everything. Sometimes I’ve sensed their guilt, that’s a big turn-off; their hunger, greed and neediness can make me feel their desperation; their loneliness can make me feel pity. Everything can be a turn-off. I want to switch off their emotions, make it about me for just this once.

  But he has no colours that I can see. He has energies that I must learn to sense and read, but so far I can’t. I try it his way. I open my eyes, I hadn’t been doing that. I see him. I feel him. I notice things that I haven’t before, things that colours hide, that they can distract you from.

  ‘Well?’ he asks afterwards as we snuggle down under the blankets. He’s spooning me and kissing my shoulder. I can feel his heartbeat against my back, the sun is starting to rise.

  I concede that his way is better, but only with him.

  He shows me his office.

  There’s a mug on his desk that says There’s a good chance this is vodka. On the wall there’s a small sign hanging off a picture frame that reads Some days I amaze myself. Other days I look for my phone while I’m talking on it. A huge pinboard is cluttered with different coloured Post-it notes filled with messages from past students: Thanks bro, Johnny. Thanks for everything, Laura. Good luck without me, Alan B. I will never forget you, Alison. Best teacher ever, Sarah. Stuffed teddies and weird creatures clutter his desk and decorate his computer monitor. A Mr Messy bookstand holds together paperwork in his scribbly hands. A photo of him with his grandparents who raised him, him with friends at a music festival, wearing sparkles on their faces, muddy wellington boots on their feet. A box of tissues that says How do you make a tissue dance? Put a boogie in it.

  I look at the pinboard of Post-it notes again. A lot of people trust him. They must have liked him to scribble their notes and stick them to the board. He must have liked them to keep them there. They all left here. They must have told him their secrets and they moved on. A wall of references, a wall of voices telling me to trust.

  Though I know very little about how to run a nursery, that part is actually the easiest. The people are what I struggle with most at the beginning. I open the nursery in the morning and close at the end of the day. I create staff work rosters and delegate duties. I order nursery stock, including soil, stones, fertilisers, shrubs, plants and trees. I look to the previous orders for an idea of quantities. We grow plants, trees and shrubs to use as stock. I monitor watering times, soil conditions and plant positions.

  I can’t afford to work exactly as I did at home in Dublin or in the flat and the balcony, allowing things to die in order to figure out where they’ll flourish, but I do read the plants’ colours as well as reading the instruments, and I do take some inspiration from my balcony by setting up a rainwater harvesting system, which captures rainwater on the roof. Frankly, I’m surprised the previous manager didn’t do this, but there are many new things I’m surprised he didn’t do, and many new things I’m surprised that I can bring to the job.

  What I love doing most is creating attractive gardens and plant displays. I could spend all day doing it if I had the time. The staff are a nice bunch, but they don’t all like each other, as is normal. In the first few terrifying weeks I watch the flow of colours to see who is the dominant character, who is changing the air for the worst and who does it for the best. That would be Cathy: all colours flow to her. People like her. I put her in charge of staff rosters.

  Margo is like dynamite. She arrives angry, manages to have some sort of altercation with everyone who crosses her path, including customers who she considers imbeciles, and then goes home. Her anger to me looks swollen, like hot teething gums. Something is beneath, pushing up, and it’s hurting her and as a result is hurting everyone around her. I notice her irritation rise when she’s given long detailed descriptive orders. The less words and directions, the better. I shorten my sentences as the red starts to appear.

  Umar is the opposite. Before I arrived he was working on displays, but it muddled his head. He prefers logistics, problem-solving, organising the preparation of trees and shrubs for sale and shipment.

  Donal used to handle the machinery work but clashed with Terry. Jim talks incessantly about plants and flowers to anyone who’ll listen, but not many people do. Donal, who lost his dad when he was thirteen, seems to gravitate towards Jim. He sends his colours out, Jim receives them and sends his back. Donal embraces them. I take Donal off power tools and put him on the ground with Jim, away from the retail part of the nursery.

  I put Margo the dynamite stick in the tractor, moving stuff around, relishing the banter with red-faced, foul-mouthed Terry. Whereas Terry used to scare Donal and stress him out, his company seems to invigorate Margo.

  I give Jim a phone so that we can transfer customer calls to him, but only the ones who have the time, the ones who appreciate the oversharing of information.

  I notice Lucy, an outgoing girl from the garden centre coffee shop, chatting to everyone. She’s young, hip and cool. I steal her from the café to work on marketing. She whips up informative social media posts and responds to customer requests, and her witty posts gain us lots of new followers. She also has an eye for what looks good on Instagram, lets the public know what’s in stock, what the latest trends are. And she gives the old-fashioned, stuffy website an overhaul.

  I create hampers to sell in the store and online and they’re such a hit that we can barely keep up with the orders over the Christmas period. The customers enjoy browsing the tunnels and the outside areas in a quest to find the elusive plant, and I begin a new project to introduce a garden for children to get lost in while their parents browse. We’re already attracting customers, mothers and buggies, to the coffee shop, it would be good to bring them out into the garden centre itself. I set up a dedicated area to the healing power of plants. The best plants for the workspace, plants for the home, the best plants for a bathroom with low light, ideal plants for a windowsill. Plants that will help reduce mental fatigue, plants that generate an abundance of oxygen and help a good night’s sleep. My little corner grows and grows with the interest it receives, until it needs an entirely dedicated section of its own. The years caring for my mother have given me the experience and knowledge that’s required for this, to be able to help others.

  On my contemplative days, when I have time, I reflect on all of those lonely worried years when I wondered why me, why is this happening to me? And I now know that if you don’t feel your own pain, you cannot recognise it in others. Our own suffering can cultivate the ability to help others.

  When my three-month appraisal comes around, I’m nervous, but the powers that be – Logical Yellow, sympathetic Deep Green and even conservative Dark Blue – all remark that staff job satisfaction has never been higher. This nursery won’t work unless the energy is flowing between my staff.

  It’s far from easy; I’m stressed much of the time, exhausted, often unable to sleep. I’m taking weekly, sometimes twice-weekly trips to Naomi for reiki, reflexology, everything I can do to rebuild me. Most of the time she tells me to just breathe.

  But what helps me the most, the greatest tonic of all, is that I’ve fallen head over heels in love with Andy.

  I bring Lily to a nice restaurant for her birthday; not fine dining, but a lot better than she’s used to. I’ve told them about her disability in advance and so they make a fuss of her when she arrives, not in an insulting way but in a way that shows they’ve made efforts to prepare for her arrival. Of course she’s uncomfortable about the entire thing, but not necessarily in a bad way either. I, too, find it difficult being praised; the attention seems lavish and undeserved, but it always makes me feel better. I know this from Andy.

  Lily studies the menu with her face screwed up in disgust, reading silently with her lips moving, holding on to her glasses as she scans the page. I know this disgust is primarily fear; fear of the new experience, fear of the new food, fear of not knowing what anything is, of pronouncing it wrong, of not liking the taste, of looking like a fool.

  ‘It’s in Italian,’ I tell her. ‘It’s an Italian restaurant, the English is beneath.’

  ‘I can barely see it! Why is the English so small?’ she asks loudly as the waiter pours the water and delivers the bread to the table. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, calmly.

  She despairs of the gazpacho, having never heard of cold soup in her life. What kind of idiot is running the kitchen? She goes for the minestrone, she knows that from her cuppa soups. ‘Is it hot?’ she asks the waiter with a bite to her words, and a snap. She’s embarrassed, I know her.

  After a discussion with the waiter about what is what, a turned-up nose for most of them and a look of horror when she hears the specials, she settles for a plain penne pasta and tomato sauce from the children’s menu.

  ‘Well,’ she says, looking around, a little more relaxed now that the stress of ordering is over. ‘This is fancy.’

  Three simple words that may seem harmless to most people but to me they’re loaded. It’s an insult. It says, look at your life now, since you left me, living it up while I’m here at home, with nothing. Who do you think you are, rubbing it in my face, getting the run of yourself … All in just three words.

  ‘Yeah, the new job is paying me well. You need it in London. Everything is so expensive.’

  She studies me, looks at me properly for the first time since I arrived and found her waiting for me at the door.

  ‘You look better than the last time I saw you. You looked like you were on the game.’

  It’s supposed to be hurtful, but I laugh. She’s probably right, I was kind of playing a game, with myself, with everyone. She’s also right about the difference in the way I look. Before I moved to London I used to hide behind my clothes. I’d wear dark colours, mostly tracksuits, gym gear, loungewear – nothing that would stand out; the gloves and glasses did that enough for me. These days my life is about more than daily trips to the park and needing to dress athletically to best manoeuvre a wheelchair. Not that I need to dress up for work; I need to be warm and comfortable but at the same time I want to be stylish. And then there’s Andy. The two of us go to places: restaurants, theatre, gigs, pubs. While I’m reluctant to meet his friends, there’s a wedding coming up that I’m not sure I can get out of.

  ‘At the garden centre,’ she says, reaching for bread in the centre of the table, thumbing through all the different types, examining them as if they’re grenades and settling for the plainest.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a nursery too,’ I say, and to explain, I add, ‘We grow our own plants and flowers from seed.’

  ‘I know what a nursery is,’ she says. ‘You always liked plants. I have Mr Ganguly doing the garden now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘It’s my garden,’ she says. ‘But you got the grass looking good, so we had to keep that. Ollie and I were sunbathing on it last Sunday.’ She snorts.

  I light up at this thought. ‘That’s lovely.’

  ‘I got burned to a crisp, didn’t I? Fell asleep and got sunstroke. Still, I got a nice colour.’

  She holds out her skinny arms and turns them over.

  ‘You have.’

  Our starters arrive. I’ve ordered buffalo mozzarella and tomato.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks, wrinkling her nose again.

  ‘It’s cheese.’

  ‘Cheese? Doesn’t look like cheese.’

  She tries her soup, the tiniest bit on her spoon as if it’s poison. Her eyes light up. ‘This is gorgeous.’ She looks at me.

  We both start laughing.

  ‘This is the best soup I’ve ever had,’ she says happily to the waiter as he takes it away. ‘Oh my god I’m so full. I couldn’t eat another thing.’

  She’s more relaxed now that the food isn’t as scary as she thought it was. I look at the colours around her.

  ‘What?’ she asks, warily.

  ‘Are you on new medication?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She doesn’t want to talk about it. As much as I dreaded coming here, leaving the warmth and easiness of Andy’s company and bed, I have to admit that there’s a comfort being with her. I can read her and this makes me feel safe. I know her inside out. I do not have the upper hand with Andy; most of our arguments have been because of my inability to feel anything until I know how he feels. He doesn’t know about my abilities, I’ve chosen not to tell him because I don’t know how to tell him. I’ve always been guided by others, I react to them, use them as my starting point to then decide how and who I’m going to be. I don’t have that with Andy. I’ve never felt so happy and secure, yet so vulnerable and lost at the same time.

  ‘Why did they change your meds?’

  ‘Because the other ones weren’t working.’

  The waiter places our main courses down.

  ‘I’ll never get through all that,’ is her response.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks, pointing at my plate with her knife.

  ‘Cannelloni.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A kind of pasta wrap, filled with cheese and spinach.’

  ‘Alice,’ she says, disgusted, then concentrates on her food. She lifts the basil from the centre of the pasta and places it to the side as though she’s found a hair in her food.

  ‘Black pepper?’ the waiter approaches the table with an oversized grinder.

  ‘The size of it,’ she says.

  ‘No thank you,’ I say.

  ‘Parmesan?’ he asks.

  ‘Cheese,’ I say to her.

  ‘I’m not thick,’ she says loudly.

  I look up at the waiter, who gives me a sympathetic smile and leaves.

  ‘The meds are stronger,’ I say. They’re heavier, I can tell. They’re a different colour than the others, for a start; it surrounds her mood as though it’s a bacteria, but not like the others, it crushes the mood, it’s heavy.

  ‘They make me tired.’

  ‘Did you remember to take your old meds when you were supposed to? They always worked well before.’

  ‘Yes, I remembered,’ she says loudly, and then remembers where she is. ‘Sometimes I forgot. Ollie isn’t a slave driver like you.’

  ‘I’m going to take that as a compliment.’

  She shovels the pasta into her mouth. ‘This is delicious.’

  I’m pleased. Inspired by the positivity, I open up. ‘I met someone.’

  ‘Yeah?’ she looks up, a smirk on her face.

  ‘Andy is his name. He’s from Scotland.’

  ‘When were you in Scotland?’

  ‘I wasn’t. I met him in London.’

  ‘Oh well, I don’t know, do I? I don’t know everything you do.’

  Silence.

  ‘I can never understand what those Scottish people say.’

  I laugh, smile goofily at the thought of him. ‘He has some peculiar turns of phrase.’

  She keeps eating. For a tiny woman who said she couldn’t eat another thing, she’s doing a good job of the giant bowl of penne.

  ‘He’s a youth worker.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He helps kids who need support, teens, up to twenty-five-year-olds.’

  ‘Troublemakers?’ she asks, a grin on her face. ‘No wonder you get along. Does he get paid or is that one of those volunteer jobs?’

  ‘He gets paid.’

  ‘Good.’

  She forks the pasta into her mouth so fast I barely see her chew.

  ‘What age is he?’

  ‘Thirty-six.’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘Is he married?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Are you sure? They lie, you know.’

  ‘He’s not married.’

  ‘Well he’s old to not be married. Is he separated or divorced? You don’t want what little money a youth worker makes going to another family.’

  ‘No, he’s not. Anyway, I can take care of myself.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ she says, but she’s good-humoured about it because she places her fork down in an empty bowl and groans. ‘I couldn’t eat another thing.’

  ‘I didn’t bring your present with me—’

  ‘Oh don’t,’ she interrupts, not wanting to talk about her birthday.

  ‘We have to collect it today. It’s not far from here.’ Which is why I chose this restaurant.

  I pay the bill and she’s all thank yous and looking people in the eye as she leaves. The best food she’s ever eaten, she tells them all.

  We’re only a block away from where we need to be and she goes silent when she sees where we’re going, her head, I’m sure, filled with racing thoughts.

  I won’t ever forget the look on her face when the salesman appears with an electric wheelchair, wrapped in a big red bow. The bow must have been Hugh’s idea.