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chased the sensation of escape. I felt like I had as a teenager one night at the farm when the full moon was shining on the sea so temptingly that I left the house and walked down to the beach. I didn’t need a torch: I was guided by the moon reflecting on the puddles in the road. The tide was high and the sea was swelling in the bay. I sheltered from the wind behind a sand dune and looked up at the perfect whole moon, its light catching on the waves, forming a shining path out across the sea. Looking back towards the farm, the dark island was illuminated by just the moon and the only other lights were stars, the glowing windows of cosy houses and my lighter, which briefly flamed, then the red tip of my cigarette. On the way back up to the farm, flying geese were silhouetted against moonlit cloud.
    *    *    *
    One warm night, crazy and hopeful, I tried to reach Hampstead Heath for sunrise. On the towpath, I pedalled too fast and, swerving to go under a bridge, tilted uncontrollably and felt the crash of my cheek on the water, the weight of my bike pushing me down. I was submerged in the canal for seconds in slow motion before surfacing and dragging my sodden body to the bank where I lay flapping, like a fish, my right shoe lost under the dark water.
    I pulled my bike out, then my diary and squeezed the canal from its pages. Pushing my bike with one shoe on, I came home to him bleeding and crying. It wouldn’t be long until he couldn’t take it any more.

 
    6
    FLITTING
    I HEARD IT SAID THAT in London you’re always looking for either a job, a house or a lover. I did not realise how easily and how fast I could lose all three.
    I woke up crying. It was 1 May and I should have been hopeful and happy but something in the night, some dark unease, had crept into the room and into my dreams. Although I’d been warned it was coming, I hadn’t known it would be today. Without telling me, he had taken the day off to pack up his stuff, separating his plates, papers and clothes from mine, untangling two years of intermingled lives. When I got home from work all that was left was my belongings, with dusty spaces where his had been.
    When he was gone, I spent a week alone in the flat, making it through days in the office blankly. I’d been told I was losing my job and was working out my notice period. Our bedroom was destroyed – violently rearranged furniture, lines of poetryon the walls, books and photos on the floor. I couldn’t afford to live there alone.
    I threw an apple against the wall and it lay rotting on the floor until the day he came round to clean for the new people who would be moving in. He told me that would be the last time and afterwards, using Sellotape, I collected his chest hairs, which had gathered in the sweat in my navel, and stuck them in the pages of my diary.
    He had an escape route and he took it. He’d never meant to get so tangled with the wild girl on the phone box. I’d caught around him, like tights in the laundry.
    When we met we were both drunk, then we drank together but at some point we no longer did. We didn’t have wine with meals. He wouldn’t touch me when I’d been drinking. He’d get home from work late and I was on the floor. He tried to take the glass from my hand and pour the rest of the bottle down the sink but I cried and said I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was allowed to drink, I said. He drank when he went out with his friends. I drank myself apart – from him and from everyone. I undid myself. I tried to pretend the bottle was the first when I knew he’d heard me go out to the shop for more.
    The eye contact dwindled. I squeezed the last love from him.
    That May was, I felt at the time, the worst month of my life: shaking in the office surrounded by powerless colleagues, smoking nine cigarettes in my lunch hour, developing anaggressive obsession with my mobile phone, going on a shopping spree for smaller-sized clothes – yellow skinny jeans from Dalston