‘I don’t really remember that period very well.’ I feel my head filling with heat. The nerves in my face fizz momentarily and then, without notice, I begin to cry. It’s a flood and I can’t stop it. I bury my head in my arms unable to do anything but surrender to it.

‘It’s okay,’ he says, and I feel him rubbing my back. This touch, the first in years – it breaks my heart.

In time the tears trickle dry. I look up and see Seb, still here, calm and serene. He sits back in his seat and looks at me kindly.

‘Seb,’ I say, wiping my face with the back of a hand. ‘I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember those first months at all.’

I track back through the years, picking out what I can. The day I left. The day I saw Grace on the streets. How she bought me breakfast. Those days are like stones rubbed smooth from years of worrying at them. But they are like relics on a hill – whole but broken off. Even the good ones are fragments of something visual, pulled and glued together with my own brush. I can’t distinguish the truth from the patches I manufacture. This must be true of all memory. There is no way of knowing its truth. We can only know what we have spun, and then we are left to believe it is real enough to anchor ourselves to our memories of who we are.

But I am wrong. I do remember some things beyond that day in the café. The odd memory stands out, lit with pain. I remember one night when I slept in the carriage of a train at Waterloo. The last trains had run their journeys for the night. The carriages were there, lying empty, warm, or at least warmer than outside. I had jumped a barrier and none of the skeleton staff had seen me do it. It had been one of those old-fashioned carriages with the slam-doors. A window slid down with only the slightest of persuasion and I was able to climb through. The carriage was warm still from the bodies and the heat of the track, or the heat pumped through by the engine. I stretched out on a faded seat, the softness of the fabric against my cheek like an embrace. In minutes, seconds even, I was asleep on the narrow bench. And then a crack of light and a sound from the corner of sleep woke me. All I saw was a fist coming into my face. I was dragged off the seat and thrown bodily on to the platform. The indigo of night had just given way to dawn. It was still too early for commuters. Just a few orange-jacketed staff, and these people who were dragging me along the platform. Kicking me until I heard parts of me snap.

Then I really did snap.