Claustrophobia is what it is, I suppose. Although I’m not sure about that. I’m not afraid of being in small rooms or shut in cupboards or lifts. It’s tunnels and underground places I can’t stand. I had borne it in the train because that was the only way of getting to Russia Road that I knew, but it had half-killed me. As I looked around the place I was to live in, I vowed to myself that at least I would never go in the tube again, I would take buses or walk, I would never use underpasses, even if it meant going a mile out of my way to avoid them. But I couldn’t vow not to live here, I am living here, writing this diary here, trying to shrink myself very small and hard and invulnerable, so that the walls don’t move in more closely upon me and crush me to death. It isn’t that it’s small but that it’s below ground level . . .

Chapter 2

2

I WAS NINETEEN WHEN I wrote that.

Ever since I’d learned to write, I’d kept a diary. Maybe it was because I was an only child and had no one to tell things to or else I’m a natural diarist. Some people are. It hasn’t much to do with being a writer or good at it or anything. It’s more a need to record what you think worth recording. All my life I have written down things that happened to me when they were really important or just seemed important to me. The ordinary day-to-day stuff never got a mention until I met Silver and after that nothing was ordinary anymore.