After the liquid hit her face everything moved fast.
Suddenly, I felt lucid and I could see terror etched on Naomi’s face where her neat and subtle make-up normally sat.
‘Get out!’ she screamed, hysterical, as she clutched her reddening cheek. ‘Get out, get out, get out!’
I thought, briefly, how good it would be if her social media audience could see her now. Not nearly so composed, are you, Naomi?
Then I ran all the way to the tube and jumped on a train, amazed that no one looked at me when I sweated, panted, and when it was written all over my face that something of some magnitude had just happened to me.
‘Do I look weird to you?’ I remember asking a stranger in a daze, but she just looked up from her book then moved seats.
I stared at the cover across the carriage, longing for the woman reading it to come back. All I ever wanted was for people to connect to me. To touch my arm. To stroke my hair. To tell me it would be okay.
I’ve never been sure if a person could survive with so few connections to the world, on such meagre touch rations as I seem to have been allocated. I’ve read studies about it, Romanian orphans, rocking, rocking, side to side, and somehow that’s how I picture my life. It doesn’t move or progress, it just rocks slightly, left to right.
I bought a bottle of wine and I went home until they came for me, and then I sobered up in a police station.
And then someone asked who my next of kin was and I couldn’t bear to call my parents, so I called David, who arrived only after I had spent a night in a cell because it takes a long time to get from Chicago, even when your sister has been arrested.
The cell was rotten, and bleak, and I had the distant, drunk feeling of coming home. I wasn’t a person to exist in the world, I thought, self-pitying. I was narrow and isolated, and this made more sense for me. It was a relief, actually, not trying to work out what I was supposed to do to make friends, or how to fit in, but just to close my eyes and accept now that I was on the other side, the bad one.