Is it painful, being dead? Of course not. You feel no hunger, no cold – you’re never tired, but there is a sensation that comes with being bodiless, as if you are drugged. The best way I can describe it is – you know that feeling when you wake in the middle of the night and need the toilet and you get out of bed and walk across the hallway? You’re awake but not awake. Your body works automatically and you don’t even think about it as you push open the bathroom door. Sometimes you don’t even remember you did it until the morning, when the person you were sharing a bed with grumbles, you woke me when you got up last night. It took me ages to get off again. And you say, really? I got up in the night? Are you sure? That feeling, that dreamlike state, awake but not awake, that’s what it’s like being me.

When you don’t have a solid self any more, you realise what a lumpy, demanding thing it was to be chained to: all those needs, the weight of them. The hard thing is that this dreamlike state applies to my thoughts as well. I can’t remember who I was. A person with amnesia might say, I just want to know who I am – I know who I am, I’m a ghost, invisible and silent, nothing but consciousness. I want to know who I was.

The other day, I saw a mother kneel in front of her child as they waited on Platform Three: a grey-haired mum, the child a small girl, around three years old, wearing a navy blue duffel coat with plastic-wooden toggles. The mother knelt and pulled the child’s knitted hat a little lower down over her forehead, then tucked her fringe beneath the hat. The girl stood very still as the mother performed this small, unnecessary gesture, and then she smiled – a smug smile, I thought: the smile of a child who knows herself to be loved, who is certain that her mother belongs to her.

The mother kissed the child’s nose before she stood up and I felt a pang of recognition, like torchlight down a long tunnel. I was loved, at that age. I had a fringe when I was small. My mother used to trim it by holding it up from my forehead between two fingers and then, very slowly and carefully, cutting the hair along the line her fingers made. Afterwards, she would let the fringe drop and say, ‘Close your eyes,’ and then trim, here and there, where the edge was uneven. Then she would purse her lips, exhaling on my face, my eyes and nose, to blow away the tiny loose hairs.

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