I was part of nothing. I loitered on the web and picked fights on Twitter, hoping to be taken out of myself for a moment, and then crashing back into shame and embarrassment. I sweated in my seat and pretended to enjoy the sport, feeling alienated from the athletes and the spectators, respective paragons of physical health and communal joy.

Those were the good times. Worse, far worse, were the evenings, when I prowled in our space, temper unbearably strained. The knowledge that my fury was unreasonable did nothing to quash it. I was afraid, terribly afraid, and there was no way of talking about it because I would not be understood. At work I could just about cope, I could divert myself, and there was time yet before the night. In the evening, at home, I was just shut away, and the night was inevitable.

Elise tried her best, and I was not nearly as grateful or gracious as I should have been. Her encouragement numbed me and her compassion repulsed me. And she was so patient with my temper that it made me angry. She filled the fridge with myriad flavours of fruit juice and bought fizzy water in the shrink-wrapped packs of four swollen two-litre bottles. Alongside this were boxes of fancy tea bags: green tea, mint tea, chamomile tea, fruit infusions. She sincerely believed – or wanted to believe – that in one of those pretty boxes lay the methadone I needed, the acceptable substitute for booze that would tide us over to the other side.

Weeks later, she did not take those boxes with her, and when I cleared the flat I threw them away. Half had not been opened.

The permissible drink that gave me any kind of relief was Gaviscon, which soothed the bouts of heartburn that racked me. It was at its most intense when I lay down at the end of the day, nerves tied like violin strings, in order to sleep. Inside, a scorching, corroding sensation would mount. Though it came from the guts, it always felt as if it were dissolving its way upwards into the heart and lungs, somehow both eating away and clogging up all the vital places of the chest, and I would have to rise and swig Gaviscon from the bottle.

Sleep didn’t come easily when the heartburn was raging, but it didn’t come easily at all. Heartburn was, in a way, a welcome visitor at night, because for all the pain it entailed, it was a connection to the real and the corporeal. Worse were the dreams.