‘Fucking Muscle Marys,’ says one disgruntled customer. ‘All show, no action.’ I’m a shop-window dummy. For display purposes only.

I wake up one morning with a terrible headache and a temperature. I go to the bathroom and shoot about a gallon of diarrhoea down the toilet. Thank God it’s a Saturday, is my first thought, and I won’t have to take another day off work. I’m feeling worse on Sunday, dehydrated and slightly delirious. I ought to phone someone, because it’s frightening to be ill and alone, but I don’t want anyone to see me like this. I still feel like shit on Monday but I drag myself into the office, and on Tuesday, and for the rest of the week. I even go to the gym a couple of times; I’ve got no energy, just getting changed exhausts me, but I will not give in.

Finally I look so terrible that Anna tells me to stop acting like a child and go to see a doctor. The doctor takes one look at my yellow eyes and says, ‘You have hepatitis,’ and starts feeling my liver. Then I have to pee into a plastic canister and he dips a little stick in it and frowns.

‘Have you been having unprotected sex?’

‘No.’ I haven’t. Not since Stuart, anyway.

He takes blood and tells me to stay in bed for a week, eat lots of vegetables, avoid alcohol and fatty foods (as if). I tell him I can’t take time off work, and he says that if I don’t I am putting myself at risk of cirrhosis or cancer of the liver, the choice is mine, and he practically pushes me out of the door.

So I’m spending a lot of time sleeping, reading, watching telly, playing patience on my laptop, writing a bit, but it’s no longer for public consumption and it’s getting so depressing that my heart isn’t really in it.

I text Jonathan a few times but he doesn’t reply, and when I try to call him there’s a message saying the number is unavailable. Which means that Jonathan has changed his mobile yet again, but this time he has omitted to tell me.

Simon calls from the office, and seems to know that I’m ill, even though the official line is that I’m ‘working from home’, and offers to bring round any shopping that I need, or books, or DVDs, but I can’t face him and so I don’t reply. He sends me a card anyway. Nobody else does. I haven’t told anyone I’m ill, not even my parents. They’d only worry.

I sleep, sleep, sleep for hours on end, whole days at a time. It’s like I’m catching up on a lifetime’s late nights. Mervyn looks down at me from the bedstead, a picture of health in his leopard-skin pouch.

The diarrhoea clears up, my temperature returns to normal, and my piss, which has been a horrible dark brownish colour, runs clear. My eyes are no longer yellow. I’m better.