But then they, and the authorities, might have asked why I had fled my own flat in the middle of the night. Why was I so desperate as to run onto the tracks and why was I even in the freight depot in the first place? Mrs Abaza might have been interviewed. She might have reported the shouting she had heard on more than one occasion. Questions might have been asked: and Matty cannot have that. He cannot have one ounce of blame attached to him or his conduct – he has to be the doctor who helps everybody all the time, who everyone admires, and in defence of his own reputation he throws my parents, Rosaria, and all the people who cared for me under that train with me. Whether or not he killed me may be open to debate but he has certainly killed them.

*

I never knew Matthew Goodison, that is what I realise now, when it is far too late. Did he hide himself, or was it that I projected something onto him? I think, perhaps, it was a mixture of the two: eighty per cent his manipulation and twenty per cent my blindness – but I paid one hundred per cent of the price.

There was a moment, I think, where I saw him, a moment where for some reason – sheer exhaustion, perhaps – he was robbed of the energy necessary to hide himself, to keep up the facade. It was that night, the one when he went to sit on the balcony in the enveloping and enervating dark, and I approached him silently, ghostlike, from behind, and he knew I was there.

‘I’m not good for you.’

I don’t believe he would have said that to me face to face: it was the dark that allowed it – almost as though he was speaking to himself in a moment of plainness and honesty. I like to think that in that moment, a small door opened inside him and Matthew knew the truth of his own behaviour.

I did not speak to him that night. I did not go and put my arms around him from behind, rock him as if he was a child. What if I had? Would he have opened, then? Would he have turned to me, perhaps even cried a little? It is tempting to believe in such fantasies – we all ache to believe – but they don’t stand much exposure to daylight.

The next morning, Matty rose as he always did, slipping out of bed, going into the kitchen to pour himself a bowl of cereal. He came and kissed me before he went to the hospital. I was dressed but my hair was still damp from the shower and he put his hand on the back of my head and said, ‘I preferred your hair before you had it cut.’