I lost my job. I was working as an administrator at a care home and took a month off to recover. I didn’t get a sick note, so they sacked me. It was probably illegal, but the thing with illness, mental or otherwise, is that it tends to annihilate your capacity for argument. At the time I was spending twenty-three hours a day in bed. For the first few weeks I mostly slept, though I had such psychedelic nightmares that it wasn’t exactly restful. Dreams about my childhood, about my mother telling me she wished I’d never been born. Dreams of being shipped out to strangers while she ‘sorted herself out’.

David didn’t say much to me during this time. He went out to work every morning, sent me a text at lunchtime, and then came home at dinner time with a ready meal or takeout. I didn’t eat much. He’d sit in bed beside me marking homework assignments while I tried to follow Game of Thrones. When the cuts healed I started sleeping less, and the fear set in again. I asked David if I could go to work with him and he looked at me like I’d suggested he get a full body wax.

‘Come to work with me? What for?’

I didn’t want to say I was lonely at home. ‘Because I’m lonely at home.’

‘Go back to work, then.’

‘They sacked me, remember?’

‘Can’t you just look for a new job?’

‘I could sit in the staffroom and read.’

‘You can’t do that …’

‘Why not?’

‘It would be weird, Lexi. You know it would.’

‘Maybe the caretaker’s cupboard.’

‘The what?’

‘Don’t schools still have those? Mine did.’

‘Look, I’ll FaceTime you.’

He didn’t FaceTime me.

I went to the public library but it was too loud. People were staring and it felt like being branded with hot irons. The books were full of stories that shouted at me and I worried they might fly off the shelves and hit me. Difficult to explain these kinds of things when a librarian is leaning over you asking why you’re hyperventilating on the floor.