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funny happened in the cinema that night. It was as if every one of us in the audience had been plugged into one another. The film can’t have been that scary, but we all screamed as one, clung to complete strangers, and at the end, when the murderer was climbing up the stairs to kill the photographer, we all started shouting at her to “Turn around and get the gun” at the top of our voices. It was exhilarating. When the film finally ended, all of us were laughing in our seats, none of us seemed to have the energy to move, and the cinema bars were full with people who wanted to talk about what had just happened.
    Sally and I giggled for the whole of the train journey home, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew that something wonderful had happened. I’d been part of something. I felt a deep sense of anticlimax for a long time afterward.
    See also Danger; God; Sculpture; Why?
    houses
    Most Saturdays, our family would go and look at smart houses in the area that were up for sale.
    It was just a hobby, though, because we could never really afford any of the homes we looked at. When we saw one we particularly liked, we would spend the week afterward talking together about which piece of furniture would go where. We’d have arguments trying to decide what color we would paint each room, which would be my bedroom, where my mother would sit and read in the evenings.
    Sometimes I’d watch my parents walk round someone else’s house hand in hand, and I’d know what it was like to feel secure.
    One house we saw was perfect. It started singing to us the minute we walked in. My mother and father opened cupboards in the large kitchen, sat on the window seat and watched where the sun fell, stood in silence looking at the view from the bedroom. I went downstairs to leave them in peace and found a room we hadn’t gone into before.
    It was extraordinary. Inside, every wall was covered in doors, all hung in identical white-painted doorframes. I opened one at random, and all that was behind it was the wallpaper. I opened another, and then another, but all I could find was nothingness. It took me a long time to find the right door, the door out, and by the time I did, I was crying.
    No one spoke in the car on the way home, and when I followed my father inside, I watched him kick our kitchen table when he thought no one was looking. My parents were upset that they couldn’t afford the house, but I was pleased. It took me a long time before I could open a door without a feeling of dread, but when I told my father about it, he wouldn’t believe me.
    See also Doors; Kitchen Equipment; Magazines; Property; True
Romance; Yellow

I
    ice cream
    When I was six, I was taken to see The Railway Children but had to leave halfway through because I put my ice cream down the neck of the woman sitting in front of me. The funny thing is that I still want to do the same every time I go to the movies. Just to see what will happen.
    I used to like to bite off the end of my cone and suck the ice cream out that way. It upsets me nowadays to see that even advertisements for ice-cream products are using sex to make them appealing. I once gave up sex for a whole year. It was amazing how much extra time I had. It wasn’t that I was doing it all the time. It was the side effects. If you’re not interested in sex, then there’s hardly a book, a film, a piece of music that you need to bother with. There are so many more hours in the day.
    See also Glitter; Sex; Victim; Zero
    illness
    I hate being ill.
    Other people at work have what they call “duvet days,” but I think they’re probably the ones who have never come across really sick people. Otherwise, they wouldn’t pretend.
    When my mother was in hospital, my father and I used to go and visit her every day. We would take a picnic for after our visit and have it in the little garden by the side of the car park. It became important that every day we’d have the same things to eat. Cheese and ham