‘You can stay a little longer, if you like. If that would be useful to you, I mean.’

‘Would it be useful to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll stay!’

My chest floods with warmth. She hugs me from where she’s sitting and her head is against my stomach. I think about how when she was a foetus in my grandmother’s womb she already had eggs inside her, and one of those eggs would become me. What would become three of us was there, in one body, all at once – like those Droste-effect pictures that show a girl reading a book with a picture on the book of a girl reading a book with a picture on the book of a girl reading a book with a picture on the book of a girl …

Mum,

I am sorry to do this at Christmastime, and I know the sight of my body in the bath is going to be a terrible thing to come home from the Bahamas to, I just thought it best to get it out of the way while you were away. I also thought New Year (New Millennium!), New Start – and what better time to have a complete life overhaul than now? Once the funeral’s out of the way, you and Roger can crack on with your chic new life together. I just hope his wife understands. Once you tell her your daughter committed suicide she’s bound to let you off the hook.

As for my reasons, let’s just say I have come to feel desultory about my impending existence, and it’s an attitude that is rather incompatible with life. You know what I can’t tolerate? Consciousness. Specifically this consciousness. I’m hoping you’re wrong about everything and I don’t end up stranded in this consciousness for all eternity except with no body, because my body is the one part of me I actually like, apart from my thighs, and the second teeth on either side of my front teeth, and my shapeless feet and lack of discernible eyelashes and brows.

I read an interesting thing the other day about bees. In a honeybee colony, the queen bee rules while her daughters do nothing but work. They forgo the chance to have offspring of their own, despite being physically capable of producing sons. When the queen dies, the workers find an egg of suitable age and feed it royal jelly, resulting in a royal successor, but sometimes they don’t succeed, leaving the colony queenless. It’s a risk. They give it all up for the good of the hive. Imagine that kind of altruism.

I’m afraid I just don’t have it in me.

So, farewell.

Jenny x

GRANMA SAID

‘Oh, it’s you two again, is it?’

‘Hi, Granma,’ I said. The day room was beige and maroon, like her nightgown. She ignored me. ‘Where’s my little dog?’ she said. She meant Nathaniel (the spaniel).