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For the last eleven years, eleven months and twenty-eight days I’ve washed my hair every morning. Today will be different. I wipe the tap. Two, three. Turn it on and watch the water swirl. A shred of potato peel dances like a dervish in the plughole. I pour the cold dregs from the kettle onto the plant and hold my hand in the flow from the tap. As the water limbers past two floors of overheated flats, its body-warmth ebbs. I fill the kettle before it’s completely cold, then the glass, and gulp it down. Ten, eleven, drain at twelve. Never the number after. The water’s icy now, like the scuds of snow flecking past the window. I switch the kettle on. I never get the routine quite right. The devil’s in the detail.

 
The sky’s bruised pink-purple. A naked birch shivers, black and exposed above the moss-grey rooftops. A white van pulls into the car park. It slides into the space alongside the anonymous silver car, not quite straight. I wash my hands. Marmalade? Eggs? I never was a breakfast person. I have to make myself. Porridge is good comfort food for a day like this. Half a cup of oats. The stream pours creamy into the pan. A cup of milk and half a cup of water. A twist of salt. It’s rubbish without salt. The men in the van are opening flasks and tupperware. The driver’s wearing a black hat. He bites into whatever’s in his hand and shakes out a newspaper. The silver car has tinted windows. The porridge erupts. I pull it off the heat and beat it into submission with a wooden spoon. A splash sizzles on the stove, the smoke curling away as it blackens. I can’t even get this right. I wipe up the charred remains and replace the pan. It simmers sullenly, waiting for me to turn my back. Revenge is sweet. I never had much of a sweet tooth.

 
I balance the tea on the bathroom sink. It’s in the pink cup today. I wash my hands. The face looking out of the mirror is old, and seems wearier than usual. It can’t be long now. My hair’s growing through. I stopped colouring it in August. It had been six months and I’d heard nothing. I called it ash blonde in another life, but the roots are nothing more nor less than white.

 
The men have got out of the van by the time I get back to the kitchen. Their toolboxes and reels of cable are stacked on the wall and they’re taking down ladders. They’ve come to fix something. The boiler perhaps, or the dodgy entry phone. The porridge is thick and steamy. It glurps into the bowl and waits for the butter and cream. I scrub the pan, gouging at the oatmeal skin with my nails. Porridge isn’t best served cold, but I can’t leave the pot dirty. The first time I left I washed the dishes. I dried them and stacked them in the cupboard, everything in its right place, then I wrapped Molly in a blanket and caught the bus across town. He pretended not to understand why I did the dishes. I’m still pretending not to understand why I went back. The butter melts. The van door bangs. I pour on the cream. It’s the top of the milk, and safe as childhood. The oats combat the cholesterol. Porridge is good and bad. Yin and Yang. A perfect balance. I stir slowly, leaving a rim of cream around the porridge. The Sudoku book’s ready on the table, but the pencil’s blunt. I twist the sharpener. Six, seven, never the next one. If I can only get it right, I won’t need to wash my hair. I can’t see the van from here, but I can hear their banter. Not the words, but the sound of voices. It feels reassuring.

 
Today is the twenty-ninth of February, and Molly’s birthday. I let myself think about it now. She didn’t have many birthdays, not proper ones, and the thought’s been there, like a butterfly at a locked window for weeks. I close my eyes and she’s here in front of me. Pink T-shirt, pink jeans, pink trainers and strawberry blonde hair. Her blue-green eyes reflect the eight candles on a pink cake. She pushes back a curl and leans on tiptoe to blow them out.
Make a wish, Molly
I know what she wishes for.
So pure
He breathes thickly behind me.
So pure
I can smell the alcohol oozing from every pore. He hasn’t been home for three days. He vanishes when the singing starts.
Happy birthday, dear Molly …

I barely noticed the porridge. It’s all wrong. I should have finished the sudoku first. I run hot water in the kitchen. Outside, a ladder clangs. The driver’s taken off his hat, and I suddenly don’t know who’s who any more. One of the men approaches the car and knocks on the driver’s window. I plunge my hands into the scalding water. It’s cleansing, but it’s not enough. I’m going to have to wash my hair.

 
One of the van men’s leaning on the roof of the car now, exchanging pleasantries as if it’s any other morning. His mate rattles the ladder against the wall. I can see now he’s no more than a lad. He has no idea what’s going on. I wash the porridge bowl. Round and back. Five times. Inside and out. My hands are red. The tips of my fingers whiten in the heat.
Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.
The car door opens. The barrel glints in the winter sun. I straighten and lean towards the window. He mustn’t miss me this time. The spoon splashes into the water and everything unravels backwards.

 
The courtroom’s cold, and I’m left alone. They drag him from the dock.
You can run, but you can’t hide. Slag
It shouldn’t have been that way. I was her mother and I should have protected her.
What kind of a mother are you?
They’ll have to prise her from me now. I failed her. I won’t let her go. There’s nothing anyone can do. The paramedic’s sobbing like a baby. I don’t know who called them, how long they’ve been here, or how they got here. The police are here. The ambulance arrives. How can one fragile life hold so much blood? There’s blood everywhere. Blood in my hair, so much blood. There’s blood on my clothes. She’s limp in my arms. He’s too blind drunk to stop. She launches herself at me.
No, Daddy
She sees the blade before I do. They’re a birthday present from my mother. She’s come down specially to show them off. Molly’s on the stairs in her new pink pyjamas. He erupts into the house.
This time I’m going to kill you. Bitch
The kitchen window implodes. Pain burns through every part of me. The purifying fire I’ve longed for, and everything falls away at last. I won’t need to wash my hair ever again.

It’s dark the way only an October night in England can be, and raining a baptism. I’m walking home from Mrs M’s, reflecting on the fragility of life. In truth, I’ve believed Mrs M to be immortal until now, but she’s 92 and so frail it’s taken two of us to get her into bed tonight.  My faith is beginning to waver.  I don’t yet know the day when I’ll hold her hand while she fights her last battle is less than eight weeks away, but there’s a sense of finality.

When I first ducked into the downpour, I hoped it might wash away the stench of mortality.  Now I’m wishing I’d accepted the offer of a taxi. I’m weary, soaked to the bone, and I’m the only living creature on the street.  Even the foxes are in their holes. There are no low-slung shadows sliding between the pools of light around the street lamps tonight.  The avenue stretches unbending before me into endless rain.  Then out of nowhere there’s a car behind me.  It’s moving too fast.  It hurtles along the avenue, flies over a speed hump and throws up a wall of water that hits me full in the small of the back. Howls of laughter trail in its wake as it accelerates away.

If there’s no peculiar corner of hell for people who do things like that, I’m up for the construction job.  They’ll be able to rot there for all eternity, with squelching shoes and knickers full of icy mud, while an infinite quantity of rain flushes out their rage and humiliation.  Come to think of it, they can share their cosy corner with the man who allowed someone I love to pay his rent during his teacher training, then walked out and left her the day the course ended.  But that’s another story.

In a life long gone, I open my eyes on a blur of grey and surgical green.  A voice is telling me something I already know.

She’s gone. There was nothing they could do.

They seem shocked by what’s happened to you.  I try to reassure them it’s just as I knew it would be.  I realised from the start you were too good to be true.  I drift through consciousness, my heart so broken there’s no point in recriminations or tears.  The scene changes and someone brings you to me.  Your mouth’s just a little bruised, and you’re wearing the wrong clothes.  Your head feels cool against my lips as I kiss you goodbye.  Later they’ll tell me there was peace in the room that night, and we’ll take that to have been the presence of God.  Perhaps it was no more than silent despair.  You mustn’t blame God someone says, a week or so after you’ve gone. So who else am I to blame, I ask. Who else was it turned your umbilical cord into a noose? And twenty years later, who else was I to blame for the pointless accident that took your cousin’s life on the road out of Belfast Airport?  

I’m not so magnanimous as my brother. It took him less than five years publicly to forgive the boy whose simple inexperience ended one life and indelibly stamped so many others with sorrow.  It’s almost fifteen before I’m able to forgive you for leaving me, or even to admit that’s what I need to do.  As I’m choking out the words at last, you grow in my mind’s eye from a beautiful, bruise-lipped baby into a lithe-limbed teenager with brown hair and a soft smile, and I know I’ve set you free.

The woman at the bus stop hasn’t set anyone free.  I’m tempted to duck through the Bearpit to the other stop when I see her on the bench, surrounded by bags, but I’m afraid I’ll miss the bus.  She’s on her feet before I’m half across the road.  Her eyes, marbled and grey-green as the sea, search my face for inappropriate responses.

I’ve called the police on the lot of them … I hope you know it wasn’t me …

I don’t know the story, but I can recite the script.  This lady lugs her pain daily in two supermarket carriers and a blue Ikea bag.  It’s tempting to laugh, but I’ve seen myself reflected in her unshed tears once too often, and I’ve tried lifting that Ikea bag.  She’s ten years older than me.  I can barely get it off the ground, yet she carries it with her everywhere she goes.  

I’m not sure what I’d do with pain as vast as that.  Maybe I’d stuff it into bags and drag it with me too, or perhaps I’d drown it, like the man in Old Market on Sunday morning.  I know nothing about him, save that he has an empty White Ace bottle for a pillow and a swarm of flies on his trousers.  I’m not even sure he’s alive.  My companion and I hesitate.  The flies hover.  The scene is cruel and compelling, and neither of us wants to pass by on the other side.  After what seems an age, the buzzing of the flies at his face penetrates his stupor and he twitches to shake them off.

It’s OK, I say, He moved.

Are you sure?

Yes.  Absolutely positive 

All the same, I can’t shake him off so easily.  Something about him puts me in mind of Charlie in the final three-bottles-of-vodka-and-a-sweat-stained-brown-T-shirt-he-wore-for-six-months days.  We’re halfway through our bacon sarnies when I realise I’ll have to go back, just to be sure he really is alive.  We’re still a yard or two off when a young man in glasses squats down by him and holds out a cheeseburger.  Charlie-not-Charlie takes and unwraps it on the urine-stained pavement without sitting up.  The young man draws level with us.  He seems bemused by my half-smile.  After all he has no way to know there’s a world in my head where his cheeseburger kick-started a miracle, just as there is in his.

Pain’s a companion nobody wants and everyone finds hard to let go.  An old friend and I used to argue endlessly about forgiveness.  No, she’d say, it’s too easy.  It’s just letting people off the hook.  Now I’m older and wiser, I have to agree, although it’s too late to tell her.  I’ve seen forgiveness sold like snake oil.  An airy wave of the hand, a no-it’s-all-right-really-it-is, and another item gets stuffed into the Ikea bag.  Out of sight but still in mind, and biding its time.

I don’t understand all this stuff about Jesus being crucified 

I glance at my companion over the rim of my teacup.  I’m not sure I understand as well as I used to think I did. The thought’s forming that a God prepared to take that kind of shit isn’t looking at forgiveness that’s accomplished by a wave of the hand.  Instead, it’s a painful road.  It’s a real and long-drawn-out process of letting go, and oddly this gives me hope.  If I’m right, then there’s still time for the bag ladies and the Charlie-not-Charlies, because it’s never too late. If I’m right, the day may come when I’ll be able forgive even those bastards in the car, then maybe I won’t have to construct my own private corner in hell after all.

A solitary magpie flaps on the fence of the caravan opposite as I close the gate and head for the cliff path. It’s the last day of the holiday, and the first of uninterrupted sunshine. Scots pines, seagulls and late afternoon shadows beckon. The camera and I are in for a treat. Down the steep, wooden steps and the beach is more or less deserted. It’s hard to believe it’s a sunny Sunday in July. Half a dozen would-be surfers stand waist-deep in the Mediterranean-blue water, chatting. A paraglider swoops and dives overhead. The gulls curve and cry above the beach huts, circling the sparse smoke of a couple of barbecues. Dogs chase and bark across the shingle. I take photos. Fading sea pinks. Bees on thistles. The changing curl of the waves’ breaking. The blue-and-gold vanishing point at the cliff’s end. This is my fifth summer here, and every one of them haunted by a sense that it might be the last. Maybe that’s why the compulsion to record every detail seems more visceral even than my love of photography.

This year it feels more urgent still. The pebbles slide from under my feet on the way down to the thin strip of sand. A hundred yards or so ahead two small children are testing the waves with their toes, squealing and laughing. The father with them seems barely more than a boy himself. He keeps firm hold of their hands, encouraging them whenever terror threatens to overwhelm delight. There are times I wish someone could still do that for me. I walk towards them, my feet leaving prints like a trail of scars in the wet sand. Tomorrow the marks will be gone, erased by the waves as if I’d never been here. I brought my broken heart to the beach four years ago. Barely twenty-four hours after your father and brothers carried you down the aisle of the chapel, I was here on different stones, watching the waves roll and curl, sucking on the shingle as they died. Everything had changed, yet somehow the sea remained the same.

The squeals have faded into the distance now. The sun’s strong and my shoulders are beginning to burn. I scramble up the slope of shifting pebbles toward the cliff. The rainbow of beach huts offers scant shade, but I find a cool spot and sit for a while. Back where I’ve just come from, a couple have settled on the stones, heads together in conversation. The small boy with them is staring out to sea, and the thought bubbles up that he’s looking at a future less constant than the shifting of the waves.

The postman was shovelling handfuls of mail into his sack as I steamed through the downpour to catch the afternoon collection. The postal vote, meticulously sealed an hour or so previously, was damp and dog-eared by the time I thrust it into his hand. I hoped and prayed the ink hadn’t run. That was it. I’d done all I could to avert disaster, and to secure a future for my children and my grandchildren. To be honest, I still believed in that moment that sanity would prevail. I had no idea that two weeks down the line I’d be listening from my narrow bed with horror as the results rolled in. A vote for isolationism, fear and xenophobia, for an imperial past over an inclusive future, for years of economic uncertainty and political instability. A vote where half the people had no idea what they were voting for, and even its proponents didn’t expect to win. I was already here by then – the sea at my doorstep and the forest all around – so it was hard to take in the change. Nevertheless, I could feel it in the wind on the beach the following morning. Later, a text from a friend called it a step back into the dark ages. Sorry it’s happened on your holiday, and no doubt spoilt your time away, she said. It took a day or so to see she’d hit the nail squarely on the head.

I glance at the time. Have I really sat here so long? The shrubs along the footpath home host a plethora of bees. Today at least three different types work head-buried in the purple flowers, side-by-side and spreading pollen for the next year’s crop. They flit and shift with no regard for boundaries or demarcation, or the fact I want to capture them on film. They’re not worried that there won’t be enough to go around. There’s plenty, and none of them takes more than they need. My lens is deep amongst the leaves when a family trails by, two squabbling children bringing up the rear. An impatient adult turns and snaps.

Can’t you two just grow up and sort it out?

I come back to the caravan to find a friend’s deleted me on Facebook. Apparently, even grown-ups can’t always sort it out.

Twenty-four hours on, and the train to Bristol’s crowded. I’m glad I’ve booked a seat. The lady opposite is near my mother’s age I guess, and half the table’s taken by her Daily Telegraph. I thank heaven for my iPad, get my head down and start to write. An hour into the journey, she pulls a pile of press cuttings from her bag and begins to scribble notes. I’m making up stories now. She’s a well-known writer, travelling incognito, an actress preparing for her next performance, or a member of the House of Lords perhaps. The story’s half written in my head when the woman beside me leans forward.

May I ask what it is you’re doing with all those cuttings? It looks fascinating.

She does it with that classic grace no-one could receive as unwarranted intrusion. Ten minutes down the line we’re deep in the most civilised discussion of the Brexit issue that’s ever going to happen. Our elderly companion has voted ‘leave’, but she and her son are at odds and she’s trying to muster an intelligent argument on her way to visit him. If the thought that she’s about ten days too late even crosses my mind, it’s gone before it’s fully formed, because this is the essence of all those British values upon which people love to pontificate. Tolerance, community spirit and individual liberty are happening right here, in a capsule in time, around this small table on a train out of Southampton. I don’t know it yet, but I’m going to wish I could have bottled this ready to hand out over the weeks and months ahead.

The political scrum of the past few weeks takes me back to my days in 1970s student politics. When it comes to rigid ideologies, it seems the grown-ups are no more capable of sorting it out than we kids were then. While I’ve been at my keyboard this morning, Andrea Leadsom has withdrawn from the Conservative Party leadership contest, and I’m left with a growing sense we’re in uncharted waters. An odd sense indeed, when I suspect what so many voted for was a retreat from the rapid pace of change. But change is inevitable. Nothing’s permanent. My favourite beach may have looked like the same place the other day, but not one stone of it had remained where it was last year.

The French have a saying that doesn’t translate succinctly into English, probably because we don’t value the intellectual exercise of philosophy so highly as they do – plus ca change, plus ca c’est la meme chose. Everything changes, yet everything stays the same doesn’t capture the essence, just as Cheddar doesn’t capture Camembert, fish and chips don’t capture paella and steak and kidney pudding doesn’t capture Hungarian goulash. We can’t even capture the correct spelling for that last. I love Cheddar cheese, fish and chips and steak and kidney pudding, but I want Camembert, Beaujolais, paella, gulyás and French philosophy too, and I don’t want to go back to a world where I need a visa or an import licence to get them. Some things simply work better in their original language and context, and when we try to shut them out, our lives become smaller and poorer. Instead of pulling up the drawbridge on Little England, isn’t it time to embrace difference? To respond with delight, rather than to recoil in terror? Isn’t life just a little too short for all this fear and hatred? Or am I just an utterly incorrigible hopeless idealist?

The train rattles through the rolling English countryside, trees and hedgerows seaming the endless patchwork of fields. No matter how often I see this, I never cease to be amazed by the variety of shades of green nature has to her palette. Here in the deep south of England, one could be forgiven for thinking nothing much has changed in the past fifty years. A church spire slides past the window, then a dilapidated farm trailer surrounded by horses, and warm memories of childhood holidays bubble up. Once again I find myself pondering the vexed question of how I’ve ended up living in post-Brexit Britain. I watched the local news last night. Two ladies, barely any younger than my mother, were crowing with delight. ‘We’ve taken back our country’. It’s a phrase I’m growing to dislike more with every passing day.

The pace at which the world has changed during my mother’s lifetime has been phenomenal. When my parents were young, the crystal radio set was state-of-the-art. Now iPads and mobile phones are ubiquitous and no-one can remember how things were without them. There’s nothing in this world so inevitable as change, aside from death of course. Oh and taxes, unless you happen to be Google. We don’t like them much either. Taxes I mean, not Google. Lots of people have been liking Google since Thursday 23^rd June. It seems they’ve been using it to find out things they might have done well to know sooner. “What is the EU” became a popular UK search, the day after a crucial referendum on whether to leave it.

Dislike of change seems to have clouded more rational considerations around Brexit for some of my generation and that of my parents. I have a sense that what those ladies on the telly really wanted back was their lives in a rose-tinted bygone age, rather than their country. But the problem with the past is it’s not there any more. It shapes our psyche. It moulds our future. We can revisit it with horror or nostalgia. We can run from it, pine for it or reinvent it, but we can’t get it back. And if we could, it wouldn’t be the way we thought it was.

Leaving aside downright lies about £350 million a week of extra spending money for the NHS, a certain sector of the Brexit campaign seems to have been fuelled by yearning for times long gone. Britain’s imperial past, for example – those heady days when Britannia ruled the waves, God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. I’m sure they were golden indeed, for a privileged few. Those who hadn’t been press-ganged onto one of Her (or His) Majesty’s ships, driven off the land to work twelve-hour shifts in the mills, hanged for stealing bread or transported to ‘the colonies’ could laugh all the way to the bank. I’m equally sure I wouldn’t want to go back there. For some, the preference is for life in Britain through two European wars. Everyone pulling together. The crime rate plummeting. All those troublesome young men herded to the slaughter, instead of roaming the streets at night. Children sent to live with total strangers, and none of those inconvenient checks to make sure they were placed in safe homes. Running between falling bombs of a night, then emerging from the air raid shelter to find your neighbours looting the rubble of your home. Halcyon days, just so long as you don’t have to live there. And what of those who hanker after the rugged individualism of life without welfare benefits or the NHS? After all, granny could always go to the workhouse if she got too frail to work. And so what if little Johnny died from some minor ailment because his parents were too poor to pay for the medicine? They could always have another child. Or maybe ten. Life was cheap, and there was no reliable contraception back then.

There are those who’d say I don’t love my country. That I’m not patriotic enough, because I refuse to toe the line of my-country-right-or-wrong. I’m not happy to lie down and accept that Brexit is a good idea, so I’m called a ‘sore loser’. In fact, the opposite is true. I love this country deeply. I love her tolerance, her community spirit and her passion for individual liberty – all of them values enshrined in the government’s Life in the UK manual, and under very real threat from Brexit. I’ve worked with one of her unique and poetic languages for many years. When I’m not teaching it, I’m weaving stories or writing poetry with it. My island home is breathtakingly beautiful. I sometimes wonder whether those who seek to peddle hatred in her name have any idea how wonderful she really is. But to love someone doesn’t preclude letting them know when they’re making a terrible mistake. If my friend’s about to leave the house with her skirt caught in her knickers do I love her better by telling her, or by letting her go out and be humiliated in the street?

I’m one of the two people in the country who didn’t watch England’s devastating defeat at the hands of Iceland earlier this week. The other was the friend with whom I’m sharing a caravan at the moment. She hates football. It felt like adding insult to injury, less than a week after the Brexit vote. Iceland? I mean, what’s that all about? The internet was alive with jokes at our expense the following morning. England’s being the only country to exit Europe twice in one week was the gentlest by far. I thought long and hard about it all, following a string of despairing messages from a friend. The England team’s full of pampered millionaires who’ve made a fortune kicking balls around. They think they’re the bee’s knees, and they come from a country that thinks the same way, so no-one’s going to to tell them different. The Icelandic team’s a bunch of passionate amateurs, managed by a part-time dentist. Perhaps it would have done our posh boys good to be reminded that they haven’t actually brought home much bacon of late. England hasn’t won a single major tournament since 1966. I was twelve years old then. I’m sixty-two. Fifty years. Maybe someone should have pointed out that their skirts were caught in their knickers before they left the changing room.

A good few years back, my daughter had a paper round. On her first day out, she came home with a bruised leg and torn trousers. She’d been savaged by the cutest-looking little West Highland terrier you can imagine. Appearances can be deceptive. Just look what a clever buffoon young Boris actually is. I knew the owner of said beast slightly, so I negotiated with her, having strategically withdrawn my threat to take the matter to the police. From that time forward, the paper was to be left at the gate. In an uncharacteristic fit of helpfulness, my husband offered to do the round one week while my daughter was on holiday. I explained in words of one syllable that he must leave the paper at the gate of that particular house, or risk being attacked. He was back ten minutes later, bleeding and outraged. There really was nothing to be said but I told you so.

I’m at one with many Brexiteers on the subject of the political elite in this country. No-one should be allowed through the doors of the House of Commons until they’ve had at least ten years’ experience of life as it is for ordinary people. No, I’m not siding with Nigel Farage’s disgusting display of personal arrogance in the European parliament. The man was a bloody stockbroker, what the hell does he know about how normal people live? Nonetheless, the route so many politicians arrive by – public school, Oxbridge, politics – does nothing to prepare them to understand the world as you and I experience it. The gulf has never been more evident than in the very public suicide attempt by the parliamentary Labour Party this week. While they’d have been best best employed in putting pressure on the Conservatives, they’ve instead focussed their efforts on staging an elaborate coup against Jeremy Corbyn, largely because the bulk of his support comes from ordinary party members. He’s not one of the generic political elite. He’s not ‘one of them’.

Faced with an ignorant and out-of-touch political elite, it’s small wonder so many people these days have lost faith in ‘experts’ – scientists, doctors, economists, people who’ve already been bitten by that cute little dog – the kind of irritating egotists who actually know what they’re talking about. Michael Gove put his finger on the public pulse with depressing accuracy when he declared that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. Even the Daily Telegraph lamented the anti-intellectualism of that statement. The truth is, the experts we’ve really had enough of are people like him. Here’s a man who decided he knew all there was to know about education because he once went to school. The experts we’ve had enough of are the ones who pontificate on subjects they know nothing about – the kind of ‘experts’ who tell us there’ll be an extra £350 million a week to spend on the NHS if we leave the EU, when there’s no evidence of any kind to support their assertion. The experts we need in the current crisis are the voices crying in the wilderness. They’re the ones who point out that the nation’s woes have more to do with austerity than the EU, or maybe that the cute little dog has very sharp teeth and is not to be trusted. They’re telling us loud and clear that our skirt’s caught in our knickers right now. We ignore them at our peril.

The churchyard may not be the best place for it, but Amelie and I jump up and down and hug each other anyway, right in the midst of the funereal crowd. I’ve just filed past an open coffin for the very first time in my small, sheltered life, and emerged from the church to a message from the letting agent. The paperwork’s all gone through. They’ve accepted my unconventional financial status, and they want me to sign the lease as soon as I’m able. Even Joe, whose birth father’s final farewell we’ve been attending, joins the celebration of my first step to freedom. Later he’ll write in the house warming card from all my colleagues. Home is where the heart is, and your heart’s been here for some time. I’m coming home to the city I love at last.

A week on, and I don’t feel quite so confident. I push the key into the lock of the peeling brown front door and turn it. Nothing happens.

It’s the wrong key! This isn’t my house at all.

Have you tried turning it the other way?

It hasn’t even entered my head. I’ve lived more than twenty-six years in the same house. Is there more than one way to turn a front door key? Apparently there is. Moments later my prosaic daughter and I are standing in the middle of the narrow lounge. It smells of stale curry. It looks naked, and about as vulnerable as I feel right now. We unpack the brand new kettle from its Tesco bag, fill it and make tea.

I’ve always been good at making tea. It’s a Pavlovian response. Give me an existential crisis and the first thing I’ll do is put on the kettle. In my twenty-six-year former home, it was a full-blown ritual involving a proper pot and exactly the right amount of tea. You can’t beat a ritual for creating order when everything’s falling apart round your ears. These days I’m happy with mugs and teabags. On a good day, I might even stretch to coffee.

I admire the black, Edwardian fireplace. It was almost completely concealed by a huge sofa when I came to view the house, but this and the pine stairs were the things that sold the place to me. It’s probably as well I don’t know now quite how much tea I’m going to be making over the next few years. The mugs we’re drinking from are the cheapest Tesco had to offer. I have two green camping chairs and I feel like a princess. I’m starting from scratch in the heart of the city, which is no mean feat for a fifty-two-year-old woman who’s lived most of her life in semi-rural Wiltshire. Soon my husband’s going to start bombarding me with letters – up to four a day, until he meets someone else. Then, while he’s still in full flood, I’m going to happen across Charlie who’ll blow my fragile security to kingdom come. All that’s brooding on the horizon for now. At this very moment I’m more bothered by the fact that I don’t own a decent potato peeler. A few weeks down the line and I’ll be called ‘shallow’ for just this, by the man who never peeled a potato in the thirty-two years we lived together.

The first night in the city. I got married when I was nineteen, and I’ve never lived alone in my life. The cacophony of sirens and the passing express trains that rattle the cooker are no substitutes for the dog dreaming of rabbits, children waking from nightmares or a teenager stumbling in at one in the morning to tell you they’ve won a telly in the works’ Christmas raffle. My twenty-six-year home always teemed with life – cats, dogs, neighbours, children, friends – as well as the family, of course. I’m not used to my own company, and I’m not sure I like it. It would be so easy to go back, if it wasn’t midnight. If I could put all the grief behind me. If I hadn’t burned my boats. In the clear light of morning it’ll look different of course, but right now I’d give my eye teeth for the smallest familiar sound or smell.

I close the front door behind the man from Telewest and switch on the telly my daughter and son-in-law have given me. Ah, Telewest, you were so much better than Virgin Media. For the first time ever, the remote is under my control, but before I’ve flipped the channel I realise my son-in-law’s actually on the screen. He’s washing Roman pottery behind Tony Robinson on Time Team. You couldn’t write life. It’s my first glimpse of the synchronicity in all this. Life’s way to tell me whatever the future, there’s no going back to the past. It’s broken and buried, and unlike the pots, it’s best left where it is.

The first few months in my little house pass in a bubble. It’s as if nothing can touch me. I grow potatoes in the rock-hard soil of the tiny back yard. I watch rubbish on telly and find myself looking forward to long evenings in my own company. I borrow the neighbours’ cat and she sleeps on my bed when they’re out. I eat poached eggs every night and lose two stone. Is that a new diet book, still waiting to be written? Thus I start to believe it must’ve been entirely his fault the marriage didn’t work.

What I can’t yet know is I’m about to lose the job that brought me here, or that the loss will start the chain that leads to Charlie. I’ll think I’m doing fine by then. A man the one thing lacking in my life. The missing piece to make my world complete. How immature and selfish will I be to place that expectation on another?  He’ll not be mature enough, no more will I. Nor will either be sufficiently unselfish to avoid dependence on the other. It’s a meeting that will half destroy the both of us. An unmitigated co-dependent nightmare. But this too will one day be a step on in the story, and time will come I’ll learn how to be glad.