Bent against the bin like a busted umbrella, I drew some censorious glances. But I didn’t care. I had been through a terrible experience and I didn’t care. I could do what I liked.

And there it was again. The feeling. Venomous freedom.

Behind Victoria Station, where Pimlico meets Belgravia, lies a wearying net of characterless streets, distorted around the rail terminus like spacetime around a black hole. A couple of vestigial city grids collide, contorting in the process, with M.C. Escher effect; despite living nearby for years, I often found myself walking a ninety-degree angle to the one I expected, or even the opposite direction. I was never quite able to build a proper mental map of this urban fault. And by a sick joke of planning, this is one of London’s gateways, where tourists and visitors totter off airport trains and coaches. They roam ceaselessly in bewildered herds, suitcase wheels grumbling.

It was the pinnacle of summer. The days were warm and bright, though they grew shorter. Elise and I had been to St James’s Park, to meet friends and enjoy the fringes of the Olympic events at Horse Guards Parade. Fuchsia mazes of hoardings and fences, exhortations to excel and amaze. Cheerful volunteers and crowds. Distant loudspeaker announcements. Clusters of vans and trailers bursting with antennas and satellite dishes, lounging in the heat of throbbing generators. Little space could be found on the lawns, but we sat and ate a late picnic lunch from supermarket bags, and Elise held my hand. I crawled with discomfort and fatigue – not at the hand-holding, which was sweet and well-meant, but at the daily growing realisation that I was only delaying a horrible crash, that the end was coming, that these times, however good, could not last, and my withdrawal could not be endured. I had been sober a week.

When the park staled, one of our friends – our friends then, her friends now – suggested going to a pub off Ebury Street to watch the sport. Elise cast me a troubled look. But I had no intention of drinking, I wasn’t going to give in there. The pub, under her eye and in view of friends, was probably the safest place I could be, which is precisely why I hated it. I watched them with their pints – not Elise, she had orange juice out of sympathy and solidarity, and the ease with which she made that choice rubbed me wrong. I watched them and I held my soda and lime with white knuckles. Every now and then, when the others were diverted, Elise would smile at me and give my hand a squeeze. I hated that. Not because I hated her. On the contrary, I loved her, which made the threatened avalanche of failure all the worse. Not because she was doing the wrong thing. She was doing everything right, precisely as I would wish. She was thoughtful and gentle and generous of spirit – she gave me no excuse, and I hated that. A misstep, a sliver of spite, that was all I wanted, to give me a reason.