Eyes closed, Robert lies in bed listening to Cynthia clattering around the house. The sneezings, coughings, slappings, rufflings, knockings and bangings have become a strangely reassuring prelude to his day. They yo-yo him in and out of consciousness, until he too is fully awake.

He imagines her fingers sliding through her thick damp hair, temples being massaged by long slender thumbs. Her head hurts - it must. Hurt like her brains are going to explode and she struggles to keep them in. It’s becoming a regular feature, the Sunday afternoon drinking sessions. It’s a worry, but he says nothing. And he had to manhandle her home last night, back here to this very bed upon which he undressed her.

And though he knew he shouldn't, he did.

The hish of slippers on floorboards: she makes her way back into the bedroom. Though he is by far the heavier of the two, his are the tiny toe-scurries of a ballerina compared to her baby elephant steps. Hers a farmyard childhood with acres of rooms to charge around in; his full of whispers in suburban box rooms, father in the study working, always working. Eggshells and tiptoes, he learned to walk like a princess.

Slurps: she tilts a mug of coffee to and from her lamb chop-pink lips.

The click-click of the lighter as she fires up a Benson.

Sometimes she looks up into his face with such gravity and says, Do you love me? Of course, he says. Then she says, But I love you more. Yes, but my love for you is wider, he says, stretching out his arms and fingertips. She does the same, and they are crucified lovers, his chin resting on the top of her head. That's so unfair, she faux-whines into his chest. Arms fold into an embrace, he envelops her and whispers, I could not love you more, silly.

Eight months may be a short time, but already their love is the colour of years.

He imagines her dressing gown wrapped around her skin, and he wonders, Does she remember?

The question rattles inside his skull.

That is the drawer being slid open: the knickers and bra drawer. That is the brisk swish of fabric against skin: she pulls her knickers on. Then with her back to him - lest he rolls over and sees - she pushes the dressing gown from her shoulders, lets it fall to the floor: a gentle fudumph noise. She sucks air through her teeth and removes yesterday's white sports bra, replacing it with a similar one. She pulls it over her head, arms through the thick straps.

And then she slips it into the left side.

They always make love in the dark. She floats high above him, hips lushing like waves against the shore, the band of her bra like a beacon moving closer, closer still, then a pale shadow soaring away from him. She makes soft sounds as he watches, and sometimes he gets lost in the theatre of it all and reaches up to touch her. But she pins him down, fire-eyes glowering in the bedroom dark.

The wardrobe door creaks, hangers rattle. She’s putting her uniform on. Its colour: the blue of Milk of Magnesium. That tight blue uniform she wears in the salon where she works on the high street. He inadvertently ripped the last one in a moment of not uncommon spontaneity. But a spontaneity that always has to be controlled.

He didn't plan to do it. He wasn't thinking. But she opened her eyes for a brief moment, blinking up into his face, and she must have seen the expression written there, for the apostrophe of a solitary tear, lit in the lamplight, slithered down her cheek. She rolled away from him, pulling the sheet over the exposed skin. He wanted to hold her then, to tell her over and over again that he was sorry, that what he had just done was unforgivable, but surely it didn't matter because they loved each other more than…

But he couldn't.

He dashed out into the garden and clung to the fence, breathing deep, just breathing. The sound of the beck at the bottom of the garden coming to him - an airy dialogue passed between them.

She is dragging the brush through her hair. Swishing, tearing sounds, removing knots - she calls them cotters. She takes great pride in her hair now; she never thought it would be this long again. Now it’s as long as his, the same colour too – a Demerara beige, she calls it. They are often mistaken for brother and sister, apart from his eyes are a periwinkle, almost Listerine green, and hers a burnt umber, Malteser brown.

The bed moves as she sits down.

He wishes she would snuggle herself around his warm body, bury her face into his hair. With this thought, he lets a thin smile buckle his lips, then he fights to unbend it because she might remember, and what would she think to a smile like this?

Of course he makes mistakes.

Drunk, he often lays in bed next to her, stroking her face, arms, her legs, begging her to let him at her 'good' breast. Sorry, she always says. I just can't. She'll chart a line of pitter-patter kisses down onto his hunger, turning it in on him. Fold it, overlap it, till he is released and soft with love.

Once he tried to get in the shower with her. She curled herself up in the corner and screamed blood to her face: GET OUT YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING BASTARD. Days passed before she would let him hold her again, breathlessly pounding his chest.

Bastard. Bastard. Bastard.

She exhales through her teeth, then the cigarette to her lips: a few pt-pt sounds as she takes it down to the butt. I thought you would have given up, he remembers saying. She laughed out smoke and said, What's the point?

He pictures her taking a drowsy look at the pile of clothes concertina'd across the floor, shed taxingly only a few hours ago, perhaps trying to recall how she got home.

Pt... pt-pt... pt...

But last night he looked.

He was alarmed by the size of it. The crude butchery stretching from the top of her armpit to her sternum. Inches of it. Inches with a brown splodge of nipple at the centre. Twisted, flat, misshapen. He was surprised that she even had a nipple, expecting just the whole thing to be gone. It was so unlike how he imagined. It was meant to be small and neat, not that Frankenstein disfigurement, not that crude slasher's seam, as if the surgeon had used a rusty spoon to cut through the skin and scoop out her lymph and breast tissue. Yes, it would be neat and thin, and he would trace its delicate line with his tongue. And with the fever of youth, that animal bed-soaking lust in their veins, they would submerge, diving into one another. In the morning he would shove her silicon falsie down his pants and parade around the bedroom like a Chippendale. Christ, how she would laugh, gasping for breath. Once shame-withered and cautious, now blossoming into careless pride.

I'm in remission.

Her expression refused to echo the pure hopefulness of the statement. She has to go to the hospital every three months. If only the specialist's certitude meant something to her.

But I know I haven't got long. It's just around the corner. You are my last chance at Love.

He wears the hat of the listener then, the hat of the patient carer. But the hat is fake and simply does not fit nor suit him. He rummages through his imaginary hatbox for one more honest, but after a while his feet lead him from that room to another, to be alone with his unutterable, disloyal fears.

Sometimes when holds her he wishes his good cells could enter hers, cleanse her in some way.

Sometimes when he is inside her he feels that he is seducing the grave.

Shuffling noises along to the head of the bed - is she leaning over, looking? She pulls the thin sheet back a little, over his shoulder. Then a little more, until it's past his thigh. She brushes a few strands of hair from his cheek. He pictures his body: soft and rounded against hers: lithe, pale, almost muscular.

He feigns the symptoms of being woken. He catches his breath, fearing the words, wishing he could rewind the film of the previous night, alter it somehow, chop it up, splice it out, cut the entire scene.

- Hello.

He will have to open his eyes for he can't escape it.

She quizzes him softly,

- And how come you're so awake this morning?

He flashes his eyes up at her, blinkingly, through sleep-jumbled hair. He is shocked: in the darkness of the room he can just make it out: she is wearing make-up; mascara, a touch of dark eye shadow, and lipstick - Pepto Bismal pink.

He pulls her warm body down onto him and kisses her neck, the heady, familiar scent of the woman he adores, gently strumming the strings of his libido.

She speaks into his neck,

- Jesus. Was I totally off it last night?

Waves. Waves of anxiety flush over him.

- Yeah, something like that.

He holds her at arm’s length, and his gaze wanders from the strangeness of her made-up face to the left bulge in her dress, and he thinks she sees him looking. He rolls over, pulling the thin white sheet bustled around his knees back up to his chin.

What he takes as love is already beginning to disappear inside of itself, folding up, cut like paper, an origami duck, something awkward with sharp edges that move if you touch them. The duck opens its wings and flaps about inside of him. He asks it to leave, he tells himself that he is just being silly, but his body is a cage of fear and disgust.

He steals a quick glance at the smiling clock: twenty-past-eight. Six hours and he’ll be back in that too-big, quiet office at the factory, waiting for him and his worries to fill the sweet-scented air, the silence punctuated by the secretary's machine gun rat-a-tat-tatting on the plastic QWERTY.

He feels it: she’s watching the back of his head, thinking her secret thoughts. The bed sinks behind him again as she moves. The softness of her lips and warmth of her breath dances upon his cheek. A sweet Love You floats into his ear before she moves off the bed, picks up her jacket, and jingles the keys off the hook.

He sighs then inhales, about to shout I LOVE YOU back.

But it's too late; she’s gone.

He lies in the bedroom dark, and his thoughts retreat to the night they first met, the residue of that night still unwithered in his mind. I'm Rob, the man called Robert had said. And I'm Cynth, the woman called Cynthia had said. Then she said, You're pretty short, and he said something like, Yeah well, I'm afraid of heights. And it went on like this, revealing themselves in giddy, babbled increments. And there were no awkward, petulant silences then. No aloof mimes or silly gestures. Just witticisms and peals of laughter. Peals of light-hearted, carefree, impossible-to-stop laughter.

He opens the bedroom curtains. Grey morning light fills the room like a headache. He pulls the bedside cabinet drawer open and removes a small leather-bound filofax. One of the inside pockets holds a photograph, secreted from Cynthia's album. He climbs back into bed and carefully slides the photograph out.

A picture of Cynthia, lying on a beach somewhere, her skin the colour of butternut squash turning to tan. Aubergine purple bikini bottoms, skimpy, wet looking as if she’d just walked out of the sea. One leg raised, lazily. He doesn't know who took the photograph - he just hopes it wasn't a man.

Look at them: two breasts - two perfect, faultless breasts. And the skin from her under arm to her breastbone - baby-soft. Flawless.

He wonders if the cancer was already doing its wrong.

He thinks of other men, taking, touching, kissing, sucking. Or worse still - ignoring.

He so desperately wants the origami duck to become a swan, a dazzling white swan, and for the swan to appear before her every time they make love now, for her to not only see the swan mirrored there but to feel that the reflection belongs to her as she floats high above, hips breaking like waves against him. He wants her pale shadow to be cast into the deep waters so that he can hold it there forever, in case - as she keeps insisting - she ever goes. In case this thing disappears completely.

He wants his soul to be the mirror of her looking, and of her laughing.

He jumps out of bed, and trying to walk with baby elephant steps, he searches the kitchen for a pair of scissors, pulling out kitchen drawers until he sees the orange handles on the draining board. He takes one last look, puts his lips to the perfect image, then folds the photograph over, and over, and over into itself.

He begins to cut.

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Ray Robinson is an award winning writer. His first novel, Electricity (Picador), was published in March (described as ‘a breathtaking assault on the senses’ by The Guardian). It is available in bookshops and from Amazon.co.uk.

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