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through the graveyard. I tried to bite or kiss the cathedral, my mouth on one of its red-stone pillars, then drovetwenty miles back to the farm, stopping for lights on the road that weren’t there. I got home and scrawled in my notebook, urgently recording the fading sensations.
    When I first left home the level of my drinking was not unusual for a student; the hangovers weren’t so bad. In the same way that Guide camp or school activities seemed tame to farm kids used to climbing on roofs and scrambling down geos, the Students’ Union was not enough. I found druggy clubs and outdoor raves, often accompanied by my brother. I balanced weekends taking ‘party drugs’ with weekdays reading and writing essays, often finishing them over a bottle of wine. But every year it got worse. As people around me began to drink and party less, I drank more and partied alone.
    In London, months went by when I didn’t leave Zones One and Two. Years went by in a blur of waiting for the weekend, or for my article to be published, or for the hangover to end. The drinking took hold of me. While others worked, turning down a night in the pub to reach the next London rung, I was emptying cans while on the phone, hiding the sound of the ring pull, talking of ambitions unfulfilled.
    A photograph caught me unawares. He said I often looked like that: unfathomably, unquenchably sad.
    On another unfamiliar bus route to a new temp job, I wondered if I’d ever feel at home again or if I would be blinking under a new light for ever. I wandered day-long, carrying phrases. At night I pushed my feet against the wall and felt as if my body was falling. There were flashes of happiness, a wild, open joy of life in little things that pleased and enfolded me. I felt lucky butcould never hold on to it. Another Sunday muffled and hung-over in bed, makeup oily in my eyes, doors slamming somewhere, while up north the waves still curled dark and endless, and the aurora lit up the sky.
    Sometimes, around two or three a.m., when I had not drunk enough to sleep, I crept out of our flat. Without turning on the lights, I carried my bicycle down the narrow stairwell, felt my way along the walls and slipped out into the street. After central heating and the close stench of bodies, the night air was refreshing. It was cool and clear, like my mind.
    I never felt sad when I was on my bicycle. I used no lights, wore no helmet and knew the location of every twenty-four-hour garage and off-licence in a five-mile radius – fluorescent oases in the shut-down city.
    Poised at the lights, my foot hovered above the pedal, ready to unlock the down stroke of energy that meant I was off, gliding round the corner, into the breeze. Breaking off Hackney Road, lurching into Bethnal Green – just me, the lonely taxis and night buses. I startled a cat into running over wet concrete, leaving paw prints for ever.
    The canal opened the city up. It was the lowest I’d ever seen it, and among the usual cans and plastic bags, there were a digital camera, a saw, citrus fruit and a BMX. I pedalled faster, insects and branches ricocheting off my limbs. A swollen dead fox was floating in the black water.
    On my birthday in May, with multi-coloured helium balloons tied to my saddle and a bunch of flowers in my basket, I cycled the straight stretch from my office across London Bridge, through the City and Shoreditch, then along Hackney Road to our flat to tell him I had lost my job. It was warm in the rush-hour smog and van drivers shouted and beeped, but at night I travelled swiftly and smoothly.
    As I cycled I tried not to think about the lost jobs and all the disappointments. The air was getting warmer. Delivery vans were bringing tomorrow’s newspapers and plastic-bagged bread. All the lights were green and a handsome boy in a top hat was sobering up at a bus stop. The police helicopter above was not looking for me. I tried to breathe in the dawn and realised I missed the sky.
    Pedalling on, I