This all seems a very long time ago now. Six long years ago; like a different lifetime, back in the days when I would pass homeless people in the street curled up in urine-drenched corners and carelessly think how on earth did your life go so wrong? Well, now I know. The answer is: quite easily, as it turns out. You’d think it might be a slow process of deterioration but the truth is it can turn in a moment, maybe even on a stranger’s whim – with a neighbour accepting an offer on a house in Buxton Road, for example.

Chapter 1

I am looking out of the window at the naked, groaning tree and am taken by surprise, once again, by the state I find myself in. It is as if I have been misplaced; I’ve no idea where I’ve gone. Even my body is unrecognizable; I have deep open wounds on my left wrist beneath the creamy bandages. Every now and then they wink up at me, a wet pinky-red. My right arm, torso and right thigh are an angry bumpy mass of redness, scabbed in places; my thigh is vermilion-raw in the shape of a huge pear, my shin shiny and taut, my foot itchy and peeling. And yet these walls are becoming familiar. I know it is eleven o’clock because I can hear the Squeak coming down the corridor; I am in the last room. She’s very punctual. I don’t think I’ve been here very long but I might be wrong. Perhaps a week or so but there is little variety to the days so it’s hard to tell. This place is even worse than the other place; here they have bars on the windows. The Squeak is under the impression that I do nothing in the mornings. She is wrong. It is a blustery day out there; a day when the weather can’t focus, keeps changing its mind. My attention, however, is acutely focused. In the mornings, I study this one particular leaf. I have done ever since I got here. It sits right at the top of the tree, which is in my sightline. The gardens slope downwards towards a stream, so I’m told. I say a stream – it’s probably more of a litter-filled brook; we are in London after all. This single leaf flutters furiously in the wind; for some reason it is clinging on to life. I have the greatest admiration for its bravado.

Squeak squeak, rattle rattle, here she comes. I can’t take my eyes off the leaf. I worry that it is waiting for me to do so before it will let go. Sometimes I find myself worrying so much in the night that I get out of bed and lift the blind to check on it in the orange glow of the streetlight from the other side of the wall.