Still, nothing could have prepared me for what she did. I’d just started a new job, a temping role at an insurance company in London. It was better money than I’d ever made and I enjoyed being in the city, commuting from grey Croydon into the heart of the West End. The office was based on Shaftesbury Avenue and I would spend my lunch hour walking through Chinatown, people-watching. After the silence of the countryside, the noise of London was a welcome relief. For the first time in years I felt like I could breathe easily; that I wasn’t being judged. Sometimes the girls from the office would invite me to join them for drinks after work. I went along a couple of times but I never really felt comfortable. Having to make small talk and mingle made me feel anxious so I would usually make my excuses after one drink and head out into Soho or Covent Garden, bustling places where I could lose myself in the crowd. Most people would say it was a sad, lonely existence but back then I needed to be alone like other people need air. It was the only way I could make sense of everything that had happened to me. As the months went by I found myself spending less and less time at home. Mum’s moods were getting worse and the thought of having to spend night after night sitting on the sofa while she watched some mind-numbing TV show was too much. So on weekends I would travel back to the West End. Sometimes I’d watch a matinee performance at the theatre; other times I just wandered round the shops; anything rather than have to face Mum and that depressing house. For a short period in my life, the dark thoughts that had festered inside my head since I was a child began to lighten, and I allowed myself to believe in the possibility that I could actually get better. Maybe Mum picked up on this; maybe, because I was always out of the house, she could sense me slipping away from her. I don’t know. I will never know because she never gave a reason. There was no note next to the body when I found her slumped over the kitchen table one Saturday evening, no ‘I love you’, no goodbyes; just my mother, cold and lifeless, next to an empty box of pills.