Chapters (50)
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication Page
- Contents
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Ninteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Epilogue
- Letter From the Author
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
There was no one I could have asked to come with me. I worked as a freelancer so didn’t have any colleagues. My sister Tilly was my only surviving relative, apart from an aunt and uncle in Sussex whom I hadn’t seen for years, and I didn’t have a girlfriend. I suppose I could have asked my best friend, Sasha, to accompany me, but she was busy and would have had to take a day off work. I didn’t like to ask.
I had barely admitted it to myself but I was, if not lonely, at least tired of being alone. In the days and weeks that followed the operation, I had sat around on my sofa trying not to feel sorry for myself and imagining how good it would be to have someone to look after me. If I hadn’t split up with Harriet, if I had a flatmate, if my parents weren’t dead. I despised self-pity but sometimes, during those days when I had to sleep sitting upright and my spatial awareness was so screwed that I couldn’t negotiate my way around my flat, let alone the outside world, I wished I had someone to laugh with when I bumped into the coffee table for the hundredth time.
Now I was better, but it was getting harder to kid myself that I enjoyed being on my own most of the time. I wanted a girlfriend – I wanted companionship and sex and love – and was on the verge of trying internet dating. It was going to be my New Year’s resolution: to find someone.
I picked up a newspaper from the table and leafed through it. Pages 4 and 5, along with the front page, were dedicated to a story I and most of the country had been following with grim interest: the trial of Lucy Newton, a care assistant in a nursing home who had been accused of murdering eighteen residents. The Dark Angel – that’s what the tabloids called her, the second most-prolific British serial killer of modern times, the new Harold Shipman. Attractive, statuesque, icy, probably psychotic: she was a newspaper editor’s dream, and there were dozens of websites on which her supporters and detractors argued viciously about her innocence. But as I was reading about her testimony – she claimed she was being set up by her former neighbour – the drops started to work, my pupils dilating so I couldn’t focus on text or anything within arm’s length.
I wished I’d remembered to bring my headphones. Since my operation I’d spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks, each one consuming days. Instead, I was left to daydream and watch people as they walked past the waiting area.