I take the dessert spoon and plonk dollops of custard and pie onto the tuna salad then take a few mouthfuls. Next the orange juice goes into the pasta bowl to form something akin to a minestrone soup. I take big mouthfuls of salad, then soup, not bothering to chew if I don’t have to. I don’t know why I eat like this. It’s a habit now, even though I know it’s not right. The thing is, I can’t smell or taste the food I’m eating. Apparently I probably never will recover those senses properly. Mixing the foods together – starter, main, dessert, sweet, savoury, whatever – is merely my means of getting the meal over with more quickly. Eating is a necessary inconvenience for me and nothing more.

A familiar face appears at the door. His tall frame takes up most of the doorway. Jason.

He smiles at me. I do my best to smile in return.

Jason’s is the first face that I remember seeing among the jumbled mess of memories from my time in hospital. At first I was glad to see him. It took away just some of my angst to have him by my side, made me feel just that little bit more safe and secure. Now, weeks later, I’m not so sure.

We’d only been dating for six months before I was brought here. We didn’t even live together, though I did love him. But there were never any vows between us, no ‘till death do us part’, or ‘in sickness and in health’. He has no obligation to stand by me now. Why does he even want to? I’m not the same person he fell in love with. I’m just a burden.

I don’t get many visitors here. My parents are both long dead. My father died of a heart attack while he was out gardening. My mother died from a stroke caused by her rapidly worsening dementia barely a year later. My only sibling – my murderous twin brother – is locked up, in part for trying to kill me by smashing my head against a doorframe before bludgeoning me with a stone ornament. Yes, all of this is because of my brother – Ben. My brother, Ben, who married my best friend, Alice. My brother, Ben, who killed Alice in a fit of rage when she threatened to leave him over his affair with another woman. My brother, Ben, who hid that secret for years, remarried, had another child, and was seemingly as normal as anyone else until he flipped again and went on a killing spree which culminated in him trying to murder both me and his new wife, Gemma.