When you run and eat salad, you don’t have to worry about loneliness and unemployment. Happiness will find you. A woman I got to know through the gym offers me a job writing press releases for her company. Who knew that an unfinished PhD in English Literature was good for something? This leads to comical scenes of me struggling to pull on a pair of tights in the morning and wobbling around my kitchen in heels. But I soon get used to my corporate battle-dress and can be seen striding briskly along the pavement in my sleeveless peplum top and knee-length pencil skirt, making my way in the world.

There is a cute delivery guy who pops up at work with IT equipment every few days. We exchange adorable banter, but of course I can’t take him seriously. He’s the delivery guy.

Then it turns out that he owns a start-up company that was floated on the stock exchange for millions. We fade out on the scene where we are looking at houses in the suburbs together because I have just a hint of the sweetest little baby bump.

That’s how you get over a rape.

CHAPTER 6

Moira would love to motivate me back to health like the best friend in a romantic comedy, but she is starting to accept that this isn’t going to happen. She became hopeful a few months ago when she noticed I was losing weight. It happened soon after the rape symposium.

The more I think about sturdy, corn-fed, fiction-Lucy, the more my own flesh seems to melt and thaw.

“Are you working out?” Moira asks when she first notices.

“Are you dieting?” she asks when she notices again.

A few weeks later, “Are you eating at all? You’re almost transparent. I can see the skull beneath the skin.”

I hold my hands up to the light. She is right. The webbing between my thumb and forefinger has become translucent. If I narrow my eyes, I can see the light squirming pink and blue and yellow and orange through my skin.

Fiction-Lucy has strong, bucolic calves. I had them myself once. My ankles were never dainty; they provided a strong base from which I supported myself. Now my ankle bones nudge against their surrounding flesh like whitened knuckles. I trip over my own feet and turn my ankles for no reason.

“There’s nothing to you. A puff of wind could blow you away.”

But I have things to do before I come apart and disperse like ash. I need to find John Coetzee. I need to stand in front of him and say, “You took something from me. Give it back.”

“Word on the street is that he can’t find a publisher for his second book,” says Moira.

I find this hard to believe. “Surely he was offered a multi-book deal with his first contract?”