‘Now, Louisa, it’s your turn,’ said Catherine, thinking that the bubbly young woman, whose confident vivacity seemed at odds with the fine-drawn fragility of her physique, looked surprisingly nervous. She had noted Louisa’s sudden loss of equilibrium the previous evening, but that was nothing particularly unusual. During her years of tutoring, Catherine had got used to witnessing sudden emotional upheavals, even in the most unexpected people, when they started exploring a part of their past which they usually kept firmly submerged. ‘Will you finish the session for us? It’s always especially hard to go either first or last, but I hope you’ll let us hear what you’ve managed to do.’

‘Yes of course,’ said Louisa, determined that if Marnie had been brave enough to go first, she was certainly not going to refuse to be last, and not wishing to put herself in the same uncooperative camp as Stanley Heslington either. She took a deep breath, looked at her notebook and began:

‘I shall never forget my seventeenth birthday because that was the day I first saw Mr Brown and it was Mr Brown who made me decide to go on living – to fight my illness and cooperate with the treatment I resented so much. When I first looked at his battered body in the cardboard box, he suddenly opened his huge dark eyes and I felt as if he was seeing into the depths of me. If a human had looked at me like that, at that particular time, I would have turned away because I was so fed up with being peered at and prodded and questioned and assessed, but this was different. More of an exchange between two scared creatures coping with unfamiliar circumstances and uncertain futures. Fanciful perhaps, but that’s how it seemed to me at the time. Anyway, we gazed at each other and I made a pact with him – sad, bedraggled pair that we were. If you will survive, I swore to him, then I will survive too. All or nothing. If you can pull through, then so can I, but if you die . . . oh! if you die, I vowed to him, then I will give up and die too and it will save everyone a lot of trouble. It was a terrifying oath to take but it was the beginning of my battle to live – and his. I had been warned that my hair would fall out, had been expecting it and absolutely dreading it – but I also hoped desperately that I might be the exception. You always think the lightning won’t strike you and when I first started to find stray hairs on my pillow every morning and then great clumps of it, I gave way to self-pity. I wallowed in it. I felt like a moth-eaten relic and I didn’t want to face my reflection, but at the same time I developed a morbid fascination for checking on my appearance in the mirror whenever I didn’t think anyone else could see me. It was like an addiction. Of course it didn’t help my state of mind that I felt so sick and awful as well, but there was more to it than that. I hadn’t really felt ill before the cancer was diagnosed, just tired and listless, so the fact that it was the treatment rather than the illness that seemed to be doing these awful things to my body made me furiously angry. My poor parents had a terrible time with me. I don’t know how they bore it. I wanted to give up the chemotherapy and was as uncooperative about everything as I could possibly be. I suppose the anger was at least a positive reaction, but when I started to lose my hair I turned my face to the wall. I know now that both my parents and the doctors were very bothered at my attitude. My mother has told me since how our GP, who had known me since I was little, kept telling her that she must somehow try to make me fight the disease myself – willingly cooperate in my treatment – but no one could get through to me at all.