Pulse

gloves: all women had them. And always in the same, brashly unconvincing colours – yellow, pink, pale green, pale blue. You’d have to be a pervert to find washing-up gloves erotic. Make them as exotic as you like – magenta, ultramarine, teak, pinstripe, Prince of Wales check – they’d never do anything for me.
    No one says, ‘Feel this piece of parmesan’, do they? Except perhaps parmesan makers.
    Sometimes, alone in a lift, I will run my fingers lightly over the buttons. Not enough to change the floor I’m going to, just to feel the bumpy dots of Braille. And to wonder what it must be like.
    The first time I saw someone wearing a thumbstall, I couldn’t believe that there was a real thumb underneath it.
    Do the slightest damage to the least important finger, and the whole hand is affected. Even the simplest actions – pulling on a sock, doing up a button, changing gear – become fraught, self-conscious. The hand won’t go into a glove, has to be thought about when washed, mustn’t be lain on at night, and so on.
    Imagine, then, trying to make love with a broken arm.
    I had a sudden, acute desire that nothing bad ever happen to her.
    I once saw a man on a train. I was eleven or twelve, alone in my compartment. He came down the corridor, looked in, saw it was occupied, and passed on. I noticed that the arm he carried by his side ended in a hook. At the time, I thought only of pirates and menace; later, of all you couldn’t do; later still, of the phantom pain of amputees.
    Our fingers must work together; our senses too. They act for themselves, but also as pre-senses for the others. We feel a fruit for ripeness; we press our fingers into a joint of meat to test for doneness. Our senses work together for the greater good: they are complicit, as I like to say.
    Her hair was up that evening, held by a pair of tortoiseshell combs, then pinned with gold. It was not quite as black as her eyes, but blacker than her linen jacket, which had a fade and a crease to it. We were in a Chinese restaurant and the waiters were paying proper attention to her. Perhaps her hair looked a bit Chinese; or perhaps they knew it was more important to please her than me – that pleasing her was pleasing me. She asked me to order, and I chose conservatively. Seaweed, spring rolls, green beans in yellow-bean sauce, crispy fried duck, stewed aubergine, plain boiled rice. A bottle of Gewürztraminer and tap water.
    My senses were more alert than usual that evening. As I’d followed her from the car, I noticed her lightly floral scent; but this was soon blotted out by restaurant smells, as a mound of glistening spare ribs passed our table. And when the food came, it was the familiar amicable contest of taste and texture. The paperiness of the chopped leaf they call seaweed; the crunch of the beans in the heat of their sauce; the slick of plum sauce with the bite of spring onion and the firm shred of duck, all wrapped in the parchment pancake.
    The background music offered a milder contrast of textures: from easy-listening Chinese to unobtrusive Western. Mostly ignorable, except when some overfamiliar film number nagged away. I suggested that if ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago came up, we should both make a run for it and plead duress in court. She asked if duress was really a defence in law. I went on at what might have been too great a length about this, then we talked about where our professional areas overlapped: where law came into medicine, and medicine into law. This led us on to smoking, and at which precise point we’d like to light up if it wasn’t now banned. After the main course and before the pudding, we agreed. We each declared ourselves light smokers, and each half-believed the other. Then we talked a little, but warily, about our childhoods. I asked how old she had been when she first noticed the ends of her fingers turning yellow in the cold, and whether she had many pairs of gloves, which made her laugh for some reason. Perhaps I’d hit upon one of the truths of her wardrobe. I almost asked her to describe her favourite gloves, but thought she might get the wrong idea.
    And as the meal went on, I decided that it was going to be all right – though by ‘it’ I meant only the evening; I could see no further. And she must have felt the same, because when the waiter asked about pudding she didn’t look at her watch apologetically, but said she could just find room for something as long as it wasn’t