She caught the nine twenty-seven into town from Carshalton Beeches. Local services were delayed by works. Freight rumbled through Clapham: cement in dry bulk, denser and more real than the place itself or the people passing through with their soft furnishings taped in plastic bags or their cat in a basket. Anna looked around and wished she had never articulated her fantasy of living there: under the mercury lamps it proved to be just another railway station. ‘I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she remembered saying to Helen Alpert, ‘if only for the company.’ Just another poor joke at the therapist’s expense, one more bid for attention. A man in a yellow safety vest wandered around, stopping occasionally to peer into the lighted window of the platform café as if the things inside – cups, cakes, cabinets, paper serviettes – weren’t perfectly ordinary, perfectly easy to see, perfectly legible as things. Otherwise there was hardly anyone around.

Her connection was slow. Its wheels broadcast a mournful ringing noise to the woods and empty pasture. Home at last, thirty-five minutes after midnight, she listened to a message from Marnie, ‘Mum, please don’t just go off like that without telling me. Anyway, how did it go this morning?’ Anna sat on the loo with her knickers down; she took off her shoes and scratched the sole of one foot. At school in the late 2000s, Marnie had been so dismayed by the mobile phone that, though it was already the great load-bearing pillar of juvenile culture, she had refused to own one. What had gone wrong since then? ‘Anyway, I want to hear how it all went!’

Anna could not guess the meaning of the scenes she had witnessed in Carshalton; equally, there seemed to be no way of interpreting her own history. In the end, if you have a certain sort of mind, you can’t even separate the mundane from the bizarre. That’s why you find yourself face down in the bathroom eighteen years old, studying the reflection of your own pores in the shiny black floor tiles. And if afterwards you choose a dysfunctional person to be your rescuer, how is that your fault? Who could know? More importantly, the past can’t be mended – only left behind. People, the dead included, always demand too much. She was sick of being on someone else’s errand. ‘I did my best,’ she thought, ‘and now I can’t be bothered any more.’ After making such an indifferent job of it for so long, what she wanted to do was live. As a starter she opened the downstairs doors and windows, then a bottle of red wine. She threw the pocket drive in the recycling bin.

If she called Marnie they would only shout at one another. Preferring to avoid that, she took the bottle to the sofa—