It breaks me, a little, that I can’t gossip about men with Stacey and Milada. Listening to them talk has made me remember how I felt – about men, I mean, how sweet and baffling they were, how it was fine as long as you remembered that some of them had a limited range of emotions. It was all about managing your own expectations, as I recall, not asking too much of them or expecting one of them to be everything.

Caleb and Dalmar: I know I am yearning for them both in different ways. Caleb is the romantic object, the boy from school who had you walking two miles out of your way on your journey home because then you’d go past a park where you once saw him a month ago. He is the one that fills you with a feeling that can only be described as fixation. When you’re young, you don’t understand yourself well enough to recognise this as lust. You just know you ache to set eyes on him. My feelings for Dalmar are different – the yearning is kinder. I want to save him because I know that then he will save me back. With Caleb, I feel I’m up close but can’t make myself heard. When it comes to Dalmar, it’s as if I am seeing him from a distance and trying to run towards him but he’s walking away.

Things are coming back to me in bits and pieces, pictures and emotions – images like the elderly woman sitting on the edge of her bed. Seeing Stacey and Milada chat together sparks something in me: Rosaria is lying on her back on a sofa and balancing a glass of wine on her stomach. She is holding the stem very loosely with one hand and the wine sways as she speaks. She’s gazing at the ceiling and has her other hand over her eyes and is saying, breathily, ‘Oh my chest, my chest …’ She might be crying but she’s laughing. Then she sits up quickly and says, ‘You didn’t actually say that to him? Say you didn’t,’ and as she rises, she forgets the glass of wine and it flips off her stomach and onto the rug and luckily it’s white wine but we both shriek and jump and then laugh as though dropping a glass of wine is the funniest thing a person can do and we crawl around the carpet on all fours, laughing and swearing, around and around each other, like cats.

I had a friend called Rosaria? Really?

I know it then. I was thirty-six when I died. My name was Lisa. I knew how to look back at men, that combination of reserve with a hint of interest. Then came Matty – and I looked back once too often.

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