And then there’s me, severing them down the middle. And the photos turn from baby pictures – trips to the local farm – to swimming galas. And finally me on my sixteenth birthday, lying in bed, holding the glass of champagne that gave me a migraine.

They gave up everything for me. My parents. They could be doing wonderful things, and instead they do them all for me. And it makes me feel awful and amazing and loved and devastated all at once.

But being down here with them feels more like a cure than any of the tablets, or supplements, or weird slimy things I’ve ever taken. Perhaps not for the Illness, because that’s there somewhere, taking spoons, as it always does. But there are perhaps different kinds of cures. Cures for worries.

And, for a moment, I’m lifted out of fatigue and pain and tumbling spoons. And it’s like my life is carrying on along the window sill.

27

Alice

I wake up feeling like I never went to sleep.

Mum can tell, despite my smiles. She leaves the curtains closed and cuts my salmon into small pieces so I don’t need to drop more spoons than I have. And she doesn’t ask me how many that is, because on days like this it’s difficult to know.

‘No laptop for you today, I think,’ she says, and she wraps the lead round it like a chain, before putting it on the desk on the other side of the room.

It might as well be in Tokyo, all the way over there.

I know she’s right, though. I know the only thing waiting on the other side of pushing through a day like this is even fewer spoons for the next. And the next.

But yesterday I got to go outside. Not as anyone else. As me. As Alice.

And even though I’m paying the price for that now, I want more. The fog is rolling in and creeping past my toes and my knees and my thighs. But I have Rowan at 3.30 p.m. today. He’s promised that he’ll show me what real Living is like and I’m going to do whatever I can to reach him.

So I don’t move all day. I doze, dreaming of cycling down mountains on the back of the wind, and startling from sleep when a car comes from nowhere and shatters me again. And I put my hands on my wrists and try to focus on being happy, and everything being perfectly brilliant, so I can keep thoughts of Wesley away.

And then, at 3 p.m., I put one foot out of bed.

At 3.10, I set the bed to upright.

At 3.15, I blink away the spots and swallow the pressure pinching at my shoulders, and I drop, as carefully as I can, on to the carpet.

And then I crawl. Slowly. Trying to keep my breathing even.

One hand out.