She grabbed some towels, wrapped them around my arms and started to cry when she couldn’t tie them tight enough. Have you ever tried to tie a knot in a towel? Really difficult, it turns out.

Meg dialled 999 on her phone. By this stage I was swooping in and out of consciousness – I’d taken a fistful of paracetamol, just in case – and I could no longer decipher between reality and hallucination, which is always fine by me as long as neither is threatening. They must have hoiked me down the stairs and into the ambulance, but I don’t remember any of this. I woke up in the hospital a few hours later, puking my guts up. I’ve no idea what they gave me, but it was efficient in wringing me out. They stitched me up, masked the cuts with padded dressings.

Meg came back the next day and brought me lunch in a brown paper bag and looked tearful when I said I couldn’t touch it. David came and I immediately felt guilty again for being a burden on him. He said, ‘I had to use annual leave to come see you. What happened? Why are you here, Lex?’

I had no answer. I wondered if he’d had to clean up the blood. David was always squeamish.

A doctor came along, stood beside my bed with his hands in his pockets.

‘Lexi, before we send you home we need to be sure you won’t do this again. We need you to sign a form saying that you have no more plans to harm yourself.’

He produced a form. I signed it. I took the bus home.

On the phone my mother said that I was always an attention seeker. I read somewhere that those who get under our skin are our best teachers, and while it sticks in me to call my mother a teacher of any kind, I’ll say that her comment inadvertently sparked an epiphany, because even as she moved on to give me a blow-by-blow account of that morning’s Jeremy Kyle, I realized that she was part of the reason I’d tried to top myself. And secondly, I realized that if I was to stay alive, I should probably stop speaking to her altogether.