On a balmy Italian evening, moon reflected in still water, I’m ushered to a table facing the island and, somehow, I’m soon talking to a stranger who tells me, inter alia he’s had cancer. At once, I’m obsessed by thoughts of his scar, but without peeling away his jacket, untucking, unbuttoning his shirt, murmuring meanwhile, nonsense and sweetness nuzzling his neck, as I might with a child, there’s no way of knowing how it looks, what route the knife took, whether it’s a squiggly mess   snaking through soft flesh and hair, lost in skin and complexity, or slides straight…