‘When I lost it with you, it reminded you of something else, didn’t it? You’ve been attacked before. I’m right, aren’t I? Your reaction that day was pretty extreme—I can’t believe that was all down to me. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’

I stood rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed on the smear of blood on my shirt.

‘The way I behaved that day had nothing to do with you, what you said or did,’ said Mary. ‘No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It’s the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.’

Try telling that to the victim, I thought.

‘I don’t sell my work. I never do. I don’t even like people seeing it, unless they’re people I trust, and I trust nobody. I’m a coward. You were a strange woman demanding to buy my painting—I felt threatened. Exposed.’ She lit a cigarette.

‘Why?’ I asked. My turn to wait for an answer.

Mary didn’t seem bothered by the long silence. It was a while before she said, ‘Is there anything in your life that’s . . . in your past, I mean, anything that’s too painful to talk about?’

How could she know? I told myself she couldn’t.

‘I think there is.’ She pointed to my stomach. ‘The scar. The story that goes with it. It’s all right, I’m not asking you to tell me.’

The moment for denial came and went. I’d as good as admitted she was right.

‘Has it ever occurred to you to write it down? Your story, I mean. I saw a therapist for years. I stopped when I realised there was no fixing the broken bits. That’s okay—I can live with it, if you can call my half-life in this shit-hole living. Because that’s what it’s like, isn’t it? I know you know, Ruth. When your world falls apart and everything’s ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.’

I tried hard to hide the effect her words were having on me.

‘This therapist—she said I wouldn’t be able to move on for as long as I was determined to apportion blame. She told me to write it like a story in the third person, describe how all the characters felt, not only me. It’s a way of showing that everyone involved has a point of view, or some such crap.’ Mary stubbed her cigarette out on the wall. Immediately, she lit another. ‘I didn’t do it. Didn’t want to see anything from anyone else’s point of view. You know?’

I watched the pain rampaging across her face as she spoke, and wondered if my face sometimes looked like that.