My sister called me in the next hotel room – I tried not to acknowledge these rooms, the unending blankness of them, how they cruelly reflected my own life back at me – because she didn’t know how to kiss anymore. She’d been sitting on the couch with her husband and he turned rapidly and put his face close to her face. It was alarming, seeing the bumpy forehead of her beloved looming over her. Then she knew, because of the expectant creases in his forehead, that there was a gesture required of her. She rested her nose against his nose and wiggled it. ‘I opened my eyes wide,’ she explained, ‘as if to say, “I appreciate all of you.”’ That night, in bed, he rolled away from her.

‘I think he wanted you to kiss him.’

‘How do you kiss?’ she asked.

‘You just put your lips on someone else’s lips and go from there.’

I remembered my sister, at thirteen, forking out a malevolent tongue at me. ‘Tongues,’ she announced, ‘are for kissing.’

‘Do you use tongue?’ she whispered down the phone.

‘Only if you really like the person. Do you really like your husband?’

She thought. ‘Sometimes.’

*

I rang the doctor my sister had been seeing. I found his number online and, alone in hotel bars, I rang it. My sister had reported a range of symptoms: shortness of breath, dizziness, her memories spotting and blurring like she was being reborn, her chest and stomach filling with a substance that felt like water. I rang it hundreds of times. I prepared what I would say. I would say, ‘Hello, I’m a woman who needs help,’ although I had worked hard my whole life to appear as if I never needed any help. Nobody answered, not even a secretary. I could see the phone ringing out in a dingy office by a car park, or in a plush, velour room with a couch that forced you to lie down and unfurl. A horror image of a sterilised surgeon’s clinic with strip lighting and stirrups invaded my dreams nightly. I left messages. I did readings and, somehow, even in my complete absence, the words came out. I answered the questions that were put to me.

I remembered, ten years previously, the first lunch I had with my agent, who told me, with a laughably solemn expression, that not everybody was going to love me. Here was my great, insurmountable problem, the culmination of all the lists – not everybody was going to love me. I didn’t need everybody. I needed one person. I rang that number.

*

My sister had only woken me in the middle of the night once before in my life, but in another hotel room in another city – exemplary in its tidiness, chocolates on the pillow – she called, late, and asked me to smoke down the phone to her.

‘Have you forgotten how to smoke?’