I shared my solitary secret with the detectives investigating the Billy Dead Mates murders as if it were a great gossipy anecdote. It was. I said, ‘I don’t know where to start. Oh, wait! Yes I do!’ And laughed.

There was only one place I could start: in the middle in every sense, with the symbolic object that stood at the centre of it all, a solid barrier between one half of my life and the other – an unpainted wooden door with a silver handle …

Tuesday, 6 January 2015

Ringpull. I think the word as I swallow the object.

It happened too quickly: a hard snag in the orange-flavoured Fruit Rush in my mouth, then gone. Nothing to be done. Unless …

No, I didn’t imagine it sliding down. It was too small to hurt, but I felt it: a lump in liquid. And the visual evidence tells me I swallowed it: its absence from the top of the can in my hand. I must have worked it loose and dropped it in – plucking and twisting, my fingers barely aware of what they were doing. My only aim was to fill time with physical activity. Although (I realise, now that I’ve swallowed metal) it’s a habit I have even when I don’t need to distract myself: I work the ringpull loose, snap it off and drop it into my drink to get it out of the way of my mouth.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense: only one item to dispose of if it’s inside the can. And – I’d have said before today – there’s no danger of it ending up in your stomach. Only a fool would swallow a ringpull.

Did I do it on purpose? Because now I have a problem, maybe, and it occurs to me that might be exactly what I wanted. Another distraction: what to do about the foreign object inside my body? Is it dangerous? If it is, I have to do something about it, which means I’ll need to leave this ward and go to another one.

Did I mention how efficient I am? This will impress you: when I need, unexpectedly, to find out if swallowing a ringpull is likely to do me any harm, I’m already in a hospital – the Rawndesley General Infirmary. You can’t get much more ergonomic than that.

I’d never been inside a hospital until last Saturday apart from when I was born, but I’ve watched my fair share of medical dramas and I’ve never heard anyone mention the ringpull ward. At the moment I’m in Ward 10, the cancer ward. This is where my grandmother is dying. I have to stay until she dies, unless I can come up with a really good excuse to leave.