All this time, I have blamed myself for what happened to me, my own stupidity. What is it with us women, the capacity we have to blame ourselves in any given situation? Do they hand it out like an extra X chromosome? What the hell is wrong with us? But now, it comes home to me, what my death did to my parents, the hell it put them through – and my cold anger rises and rises inside me until I bloat like an unspeakable thing, like Thomas Warren, full of hatred and bitterness and I am … what am I? I am nothing, that’s what killing someone does to them, it makes them nothing. It takes them out of the world and nothing they think or do, good or bad, can help or hurt anyone any more. It is terrible, irreversible – monstrous. I swoop and turn, to leave this house, and as I do anger swells me more and more and I know who I am going to find now.

PART SEVEN

21

It is dark by the time I return from my visit to Eastfield Cemetery and my old home. I go straight past the station, across Crescent Bridge and along Thorpe Road, taking the quiet turnings to the flat, the route embedded so deep in my unconscious I don’t even need to think about it and, before I know it, there it is, the place I used to live: the small square block, the cheap orange brick with the grey-white mortar; the heavy green door with thick glass panels; the entrance hall in the middle and the plain white stairwell; three flats on one side, three on the other.

My home. The front door banged shut too hard all the time – it really annoyed Mrs Abaza. The recycling and rubbish bins on the concrete slabs out front were inadequate for six residents and always overflowing. The flats themselves were small as well: it was a place for singles, those young enough or old enough or simply solo enough to be outside the norm of coupledom. To be there was to feel a little judged, as I recall, a little – wanting.