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seats and sat down. ‘Just the flight.’
    ‘I’ll fetch the car.’
    As soon as his back was turned, she popped the cap on the yellow beaker they’d given her at the hospital and shook out two pills. The airline had confiscated her water bottle: she swallowed them dry and hurt her throat.
    Get a grip , she told herself. Don’t let them start to pity you .
    Mark reappeared. She hadn’t realised how long he’d been gone. Perhaps the pills were doing something.
    ‘Where to?’
* * *
    Abby owned a flat in Clapham, on the north side of the common. When the divorce proceedings began, the lawyers had said it would have to go, but Abby had doubled down on the mortgage to buy out Hector’s share. It was a silly thing to do – she probably hadn’t spent more than three months there in the last two years. It held some good memories of her marriage, but more bad ones, and anyway she was supposed to forget them all. But her moorings in the world were tenuous enough: the thought of being without a permanent home frightened her too much. She’d rented it out when she left for Kosovo, to a pair of Pakistani doctors working at St Thomas’s. The estate agent had assured her they’d be excellent tenants, and probably they had been, but they’d had visa issues and left in a hurry. Since then, the flat had sat empty.
    It was like revisiting somewhere from her childhood. The outlines were there, but the detail wasn’t right. The tenants had moved some furniture around and not put it back; there were things in the kitchen cupboards that weren’t hers, and tacked to the wall was a Magritte poster that she didn’t think had been there before. It made her uneasy, as if someone had tried to piece her life together from photographs and made some clumsy mistakes.
    Or are they my mistakes? Most of her memory had come back, but there were still weak spots. Like a warped old record that might stutter or skip without warning.
    ‘Great view.’
    Mark stood by the full-length window looking down on the Queenstown road, the row-houses and chip shops huddled in the valley, Battersea Park and the spires of the Thames bridges beyond. He’d insisted on walking her up. With the pills in her system she found she couldn’t say no.
    ‘I’ve spoken to work,’ he continued, cheerful as ever. ‘They told me to tell you not to worry about rushing back. You’ve been signed off for as long as you need.’
    Abby stood in the kitchen area and looked down on him. The flat’s top floor was open plan, three rooms squeezed into the space of one, with the kitchen raised above the living area by a couple of steps. She felt as if she was floating above him.
    Don’t make me stay here , she thought.
    He reached inside his jacket and gave her a card embossed with the Foreign Office crest. Mark Wilson, Office of Balkan Liaison .
    ‘If you need anything at all, just call me.’
    She barely survived the weekend.
    On Friday, she forced herself as far as Clapham High Street to buy some clothes. The day was grey and overcast, but not cold, and the effort of walking with her bandages brought on a suffocating sweat. She had thought that getting out of the flat might do her good, but being among the crowds on the high street only made her feel lonely. So many people, nothing in common with her. She tried her phone when she got home but there was no dial tone. BT must have cut it off. At least she still had her television – though judging by the increasingly aggressive letters from the TV licensing authority piled up on her mat, they’d have cut that off, too, if there’d been a way.
    On Saturday, she endured the bus to Sloane Square to buy a cheap laptop and a prepay mobile phone. The crowds were thicker than the day before, but she found she could tune them out more. She walked among them like a ghost, unnoticed. That evening, she flipped through the stack of takeaway leaflets that had piled up in the hall until she found one that didn’t look too toxic, and