I’d told Fred in emails about leaving Roy, about marrying Jim, and he wanted to know why I’d kept it from them so long. ‘Mum and Dad wouldn’t have minded, just as long as they knew you were happy.’

I’d wept when I read this, because I knew it was too late. And true.

I pull the drapes and ease myself down on the bed, unlacing my shoes. I need to sleep. It is all too much, even just hearing the familiar accent, the lady at reception calling the elevator a lift. I am taut to bursting with the present and past, all of it mixing within me, every sound and smell bringing up what it was I left behind. I shut my eyes and doze, dreaming of Dad’s hummingbird-wing hat, the pub across the road in Forest Lodge, the smoke of a cigarette deep in my lungs.

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 36

I look through the fridge and the drawers of the mini bar. There are tiny packages of M&Ms beside chocolates I’ve never heard of (Cherry Ripe, Coconut Rough). There are nuts and potato chips, miniature bottles of liquor. I run a deep bath that is too hot at first, but I flinch into it, my forehead beading with sweat. The bath gel smells lemony and grassy—lemon myrtle, it says on the label. I use the entire bottle. Underwater my ears and nostrils fill and the light through my closed eyelids is pinkish-orange. I hear my heart beating in my ears. I shampoo and condition my hair and shave the spiky growth from my legs, careful over the bone of my shin, which is easy to nick. I look down over the flat plane of my stomach, the hairs at the V between my thighs, the jut of my hipbones. There is excess flesh because I’m eating again. The voice saying fat, fat, fat is humming at the back of my brain. I go underwater again, just to shut it up, to hear the thud of my own heart.