I did that a lot – perhaps all women do. We know we are being watched by others all the time and so we learn to watch ourselves through the eyes of others. We watch ourselves in mirrors, in the windows of buses and trains; we glance at ourselves in shop fronts as we walk along a street. We are rarely unaware of what we look like. Sometimes – often, in fact – during my twenty-something sex with boyfriends, all I needed to do to become aroused by an inexperienced touch was to look at his hand on my naked breast, or to close my eyes and imagine myself through his eyes. It was always the picture I created in my head of my own body that turned me on.

I bent to stroke a cat, and I knew that this man who was clutching my elbow was watching my hair tumble forward over my head as I bent down, and imagining him looking down at my head turned me on.

‘You know when they do that, they aren’t showing affection …’ he said. His voice was low.

The cat pushed the top of its head insistently against the palm of my hand. Beneath the soft sheen of its fur, I could feel the bone of its skull. It opened its mouth in a pink triangle and let out a single note of disagreement.

His tone was that of someone giving a light but knowledgeable warning. ‘They are leaving their scent on you to let other cats know they’ve been there, that you’re their territory.’

I straightened, looked at him. His hand still had a firm grip on my elbow, his face close to mine.

‘It isn’t love,’ he said, ‘it’s possession.’

*

If I could reverse that moment, not have looked back at him outside the City Care Centre that day, or not bent to stroke the cat; if the minicab driver had been a few minutes earlier, or later; if the ankle had been broken and I had been delayed in the Minor Injuries Unit while they applied a cast; if my Head of Department had not asked me to get it checked out as soon as possible; if I had not stepped on that slimy bit of pavement as I made my way home from work on a damp autumn afternoon … If any one of those small events had not happened and the non-happening of one of them had broken the chain that led to me standing there on that particular Thursday when Matthew walked past, then I would be alive now.