NINE

When the train arrived at Nuneaton station Mum was, as always, waiting on the platform for me. She was wearing a big puffy coat bought in a charity shop and insisted was only for walking the dogs in, but she wore it out and about far more than I’d let her get away with if I still lived at home. She didn’t particularly smile when she saw me, but watched me approach with an intense, slightly twitchy gaze that reminded me of the dogs staring intensely at the Bonios we were instructing them to ‘sit’ for.

‘Hello, matey,’ she said, grabbing me round the neck and pulling me into a tight, one-armed hug.

‘Hiya, Mum,’ I replied, my accent immediately becoming several shades Welsher. ‘Happy birthday.’

‘Thank you,’ she preened as we walked up the stairs together, avoiding the steady stream of businessmen who had come off the same train and were clearly much more important than us.

‘Did Mam ring and sing you the song?’ I asked.

‘Yep, first thing.’

‘Did she cry?’

‘What do you think?’

My nan, Mum’s mum, had a tradition where every birthday she would ring us up and sing a special birthday song to us. We didn’t know where she’d gotten this song from, but it was to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the lyrics were a mystery. By the second line she’d start crying, and her already very-screechy Cardiff voice would go higher and higher until only dogs and sadomasochists could bear to listen. Over the years we’d perfected the art of holding the phone away from our ears at just the right distance so that her crying-while-singing voice wouldn’t deafen us, but we’d know exactly when to yell a quick ‘Thank you, Nan!’ before she, with the same lack of ceremony she’d started the song with, abruptly hung up. It was absurdly touching, if utterly baffling.

The drive home was filled with idle chat: the dogs, how much of a twat Mum’s workmates were, how badly behaved my sister’s daughter was being at the moment, that sort of thing. Occasionally, I’d remark that another shop had closed down, or a new pub had opened, and she’d fill me in with her opinion of the new development. She was glad that Beige, the clothing shop for plus-sized women, had closed down as their clothes were ‘expensive, but something of nothing, really,’ and she really rated the new Indian by the tip because they would use Frylight instead of oil if you asked, which made it Slimming World-friendly. I knew for a fact that before an Indian meal my parents ate so many poppadoms they rattled, probably negating any of the benefits of Frylight, but thought it wise to keep my mouth shut.

There’s three whole days to go, after all. Let’s not start an argument yet.

The car pulled up to the house and my parents’ three spaniels went mad with excitement, bouncing up and down in the living-room window. When Dad opened the door, they poured out, tails wagging and tongues lolling. Taffy, the littlest one, leapt straight onto my lap as soon as I opened the car door. I’d had previous experience of her weeing all over the place in excitement, so I shoved her off as soon as my parents couldn’t see me do so.

Dad, who stayed silhouetted in the doorway because he didn’t have his slippers on, was looking at me with the same concentration and fierce joy that Mum had done in the station. As I grabbed my bag from the back seat, I yelled a cheery ‘Hiya!’. He merely nodded fiercely and did a strange little salute in reply. When I stepped into the hall, he grabbed me and crushed me to him in a fierce hug, slapping my back.

‘Ha ha ha ha!’ he said gruffly, a laugh less about humour and more a general sound of delight. I beamed, trying not to wince as Mum whistled piercingly between her teeth and screamed for the dogs (now excitedly exploring next door’s front garden and peeing on everything in sight) to come back in. I went into the living room and collapsed in a chair, the front door slammed and, after an intense five minutes where all three dogs took turns climbing on top of me and Dad discerned that the journey had been good, I would like a cup of tea and no, I didn’t want a posh coffee, a mug of tea would be lush, thank you, I was left alone.

My parents’ house is covered in stuff. You collect a lot of stuff in 42 years of marriage (Mum was 16 when they got married. She actually went into labour with my sister, Taggie – Agatha – all their kids have names beginning with A – on her wedding day), whether that’s pictures, memories, or random shit because you spent too much time watching QVC in the nineties. Alongside numerous family photos (my favourites are the ones of my brothers, Freddy and Andrew, and Taggie as teenagers, staring in bemusement at baby-me as if they couldn’t quite understand why our parents would do this to them), there were paintings bought on our holidays, a genuinely enormous piece of brass wall-art like a saxophone mid-groove, and a number of little statuettes, including one of a horse so realistic that there was even horse shit in the hay. My forehead creased, as it always did when I encountered this particular piece of art. Who the hell made this? And why did my parents buy it, let alone have it in pride of place next to my favourite armchair?

My parents filtered back in – Dad holding a mug of tea so big, I could dunk an entire packet of McVitie’s in it – and settled in their chairs. I took a fortifying swig of tea and turned my entire body to face them.

‘So,’ I said, levelly, ‘what do you have to tell me?’

They glanced at each other nervously. Ever since I’d had that first lot of therapy, my parents had stopped telling me things until I came back home and dragged it out of them. Last Christmas, they’d told me that Mum had been made redundant. The time before, it was Freddy getting a divorce. Nan having a fall, Taggie’s daughter cutting off a girl’s plaits in playgroup, Andrew having a car crash – I WhatsApped my mum constantly, but never heard these things from her until I came back home. A little voice whispered in my ear that if I had any kind of decent relationship with my siblings I’d probably hear it from them; I brushed away the subsequent cold finger of shame poking at my sternum.

‘Well?’ I asked, probably more aggressively than I meant to.

‘So, everyone’s fine,’ Dad began slowly, ‘but you know back in April, we had that snow?’

‘Yeeeeesss …’

‘Well, the dogs got hit by a car.’

I was on my feet and quite unaware of how I’d got there.

‘What?’ I demanded. ‘They got … what? What happened?’

‘Everyone had parked along the bottom,’ said Mum as I flung myself across the room and started running my hands over the dogs, looking for some sign of injury even though they’d been doing excellent impressions of gymnasts on speed not ten minutes previously. ‘And when Dad was walking them in the morning, they ran between the cars and got hit by one coming down the road. It was going slowly,’ she added quickly when she saw my black face. ‘The dogs were fine – they got up, scrambled away and carried on with their walk.’

‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!’ I said as I stroked Bertie’s ears.

‘We didn’t want you to worry …’

‘I can cope with it!’ I said loudly. ‘Honestly, I really appreciate you trying to take care of me, but I can cope. It’s things like … like having a shower or making a phone call, or having a tough conversation at work that stress me out.’ I looked at them both, sitting on either side of their big squashy sofa, Fudge curled up between them, their faces guilty. ‘Please, please tell me things like this. I can cope with the big things, and I want to know. I need to know. I’m a grown woman, you don’t have to baby me.’

‘Okay,’ said Mum. ‘We will, I promise.’

But they wouldn’t, I knew they wouldn’t. When I’d rung and told them that I was about to start therapy because I wanted to kill myself and couldn’t leave the house without crying and shaking, the way they saw their youngest child had switched from ‘proud as hell’ to ‘worried as hell’. I mean, how could it not? How could they not worry? How can you hear that your youngest, who lives halfway across the country from you, feels like that about themselves and not want to do anything you can to protect them? No matter how hard I tried to explain, to prove that I was good, I was strong, I was fine, I was still the responsible adult I used to be, they wouldn’t do anything that might put my sanity at risk – even if it meant they drove me mad with irritation instead.

The rest of the evening passed without drama. Mum had cooked a leg of lamb for tea, because she knows Garry doesn’t really eat meat unless it’s chicken or between two buns with chips on the side and therefore feeds me up whenever I’m home. While we ate it, we talked about their neighbours, and Freddy’s divorce, and Taggie’s job, and Andrew’s twins. They asked me how work was going, and I gave truthful but careful answers – I didn’t want them to worry about me more than they already did, and I knew they were already confused as to why Penny’s a journalist and I’m not.

After tea, we settled in front of the telly. Dad had the remote so we watched his favourite shows: old detective and crime dramas we’d seen multiple times before. When he went to bed, Mum switched over to TLC and we watched Say Yes to the Dress and Curvy Brides, tutting about the budgets that these brides had and reminiscing over the time Mum pulled a wedding dress that was the absolute opposite of what I’d planned off the rail and it had ended up being utterly perfect.

After that, when Mum went to bed and took a delighted, snoring Taffy with her, I lay in the dark in my old room with the windows open (a luxury my overactive imagination couldn’t afford in London – but nothing bad ever happened in Galley Common) and let the familiar feelings of home seep into me. I breathed in and out, smiling at the familiar peeling wallpaper and the giant painting of a flower I’d bought at 14 and only realised recently was actually an enormous painted vulva. It felt good to be back. Weird – it always felt weird – but good.

The day I’d moved to London, I cried. I cried when the car pulled away from the drive, my dad and our next-door neighbours giving us a guard of honour and Dad openly crying for the first time in my memory. I’d cried when we got on the M6. And the M1. I’d cried when we pulled into the last service station before the North Circular and while we shared terrible, overly-sweet donuts and tried not to think about what was going to happen next. I’d cried when we pulled up to the flat, and when Mum produced the little jar of coffee and box of teabags she’d hidden in the glove compartment so that we could have a cuppa when we arrived, and when she spread the beautiful blanket she’d crocheted over our new bed. And then, when she’d hugged me tight, said a cheery goodbye and driven away (only, I learnt later, to park around the corner and sob), I went upstairs and cried until I had nothing left in me to give, until everything I was lay on my pillow in two mascara-smeared puddles.

Emotions are so much more complex than you give them credit for when you’re young, aren’t they? Until I hit about 13, I knew you could be happy and I knew you could be sad, and that you could be angry or excited or guilty or lonely, but I didn’t know you could feel all of those emotions at once, in different parts of yourself. I didn’t know your eyes could be sad while your legs were so excited that they kept doing little skips, that your heart could feel heavy while your head was dizzyingly light. As I sat in my new bedroom, I felt sick with longing for the home I’d known for the past 22 years and angry, almost petulant, that I’d had to leave it. In the same breath, I was so excited for my new life that I could sing.

I get a mini-version of that feeling every time I go on a train home to visit my family, and then again, every time I leave them to come home to London. Leaving home to go home, and then going home again, and never quite knowing which one is the ‘real’ home. Or do I have two homes? Maybe I have none? At what point does the home I’ve made for myself supersede the one my parents gave everything to make for me? When does my life stop feeling so temporary and transient? When do I start trusting myself and the life I’ve built to be my life, rather than the thing I’m just doing right now?

Coming back to see my family is exciting, because I get to ‘come home’. But it’s sad, too, because I’m leaving behind my home. And not just my home, but the person I am in that home: whenever I get on a train, I feel like I’m both returning to myself and leaving myself behind on the platform, no matter whether that train is Nuneaton- or London-bound. For a day or so I always feel awkward in my own skin, then slip back into the role I’ve perfected of daughter, sister, neighbour, wife. The problem is, that awkwardness lasts longer and feels more and more uncomfortable with every passing year, and I can’t help but worry about what will happen when it becomes unbearable.

The best way to describe it is this: coming back to see my parents always feels like putting on an old pair of slippers. Not your slippers you’ve had for ages, but an old pair of slippers, the ones before the pair you’re currently wearing. Although comfortable and familiar and lovely, they’re also strange and disconcerting, and was there always that hole, there, just under the heel? Really? Huh. It might have gone unnoticed before, but it’s rubbing you raw, now. They don’t feel the same as they used to, no matter how much you wish they did, and you’re really, really not sure how long it’ll be before you start to bleed.

To celebrate Mum’s birthday, we were going out for a meal at the very same Indian restaurant she’d pointed out to me on the trip home from the station. And by ‘we’ I mean me, my parents, my siblings and their families. The birthday of one of our parents acted as a kind of homing signal; my siblings rarely saw or even spoke to each other, but the second either Mum, Dad or a Nan had a birthday, we descended like locusts on a dead buffalo – if the buffalo was wearing a party hat and saying, ‘You didn’t need to get me anything, love, you being here is enough.’ We might miss the occasional Christmas or look up and realise it’s been half a year since we spent the weekend with them, but we’d never, ever miss their birthdays.

So, as I stood in front of the mirror that night and tried to apply winged eyeliner without making myself look like Avril Lavigne, circa 2008, I was highly aware that I wasn’t just applying make-up because I wanted to look pretty, but I needed it to double up as armour. My stomach was a heaving mass of eels because I was so worried about how the evening would go. The last time I’d spoken to Freddy, he’d taken the piss out of me for being a London wanker. And when I’d spoken to Taggie she’d made snide remarks about my ever-increasing waistline. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d spoken to Andrew; I actively tried not to, the twat. If I was to survive tonight without using my knife to either stab someone in the face or slit my own wrists at the dinner table then I needed to be bulletproof, and the secret to that is always going to be perfect eyeliner.

When Mum, Dad and I got to the restaurant, Andrew was already sat at the table with his wife, Dolly, and their twin girls, Prudence and Sierra. He and Dolly stood up as we walked in, and she hugged Mum effusively.

‘Carole, it’s so good to see you!’ she lied convincingly, smiling widely. Her hair had been cut into a sharp bob and dyed a weird mix of dark brown with thick blonde streaks – it made her look like a shocked tiger. ‘Happy birthday, babe!’

‘Hello, Delores,’ Mum replied, smiling just as convincingly back. Dolly’s smile didn’t flicker. Instead, she presented Mum with a sparkly purple gift bag.

‘It’s not much – it’s just so hard to buy for you, you’ve got everything you need already!’ she said sweetly. Mum smiled just as sweetly back and peered inside the bag – which, I was willing to bet next week’s Costa money on, contained a Body Shop smellies set that she’d received for Christmas and hadn’t wanted. I couldn’t really blame her; Mum did the exact same thing to people social convention forced her to buy presents for, too. Dad, meanwhile, totally ignored Mum and Dolly doing their very well-practiced dance of social necessity, and instead shook Andrew’s hand and kissed the squirming twins on the side of their heads.

‘Say hello to Nan and Bampy, girls,’ Andrew said in his gruff Welsh accent. I felt a pang; one of the many reasons I theorised my siblings and I didn’t really get on was that they all grew up in Wales, but we moved to England when I was seven. That’s a whole cultural world that they share, but I don’t share with them. It also means they have their lovely accents, but I only sound Welsh when I’m drunk, angry, or I’ve been watching the episodes of Doctor Who set in Wales.

In true Jones fashion, the twins totally ignored their father. Andrew shrugged half-heartedly, and gave me an awkward nod.

‘Hiya, sis,’ he said. ‘You alright?’

‘Hiya. I’m alright, ta. You?’

‘I’m alright.’

And that, if I can help it, is the extent of the conversation I’ll have with him this evening.

Cunt.

Taggie arrived shortly afterwards, looking as thin and beautiful as she always does. I tugged at my dress self-consciously. Her daughter Alice was trailing behind, like she’d been literally dragged from the car – which, knowing Taggie and Alice, isn’t entirely unlikely. Taggie had never revealed who Alice’s father was, and my nan often opined that the whole reason Alice was ‘so badly behaved’ was that she didn’t have a strong father figure to discipline her. Mum and I privately agreed that Alice wasn’t even that bad, she just took after Taggie, who in turn took after Nan; the lot of them were headstrong shitbags, and Nan was the worst of them all. We didn’t say that to them, obviously. It wasn’t worth the sulk. Or the bruises.

‘Nice make-up,’ Taggie said, sliding into the seat next to me.

‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘It’s a new eyeliner. From Mac.’

‘Suits you!’ she said cheerily. My heart soared. ‘Not sure about that lipstick, though. Is your mouth really big enough to pull off red?’

‘Thanks, Tags,’ I said, grimacing. ‘How’s work?’

‘Eh,’ she said dismissively, waving a hand absentmindedly and trying to get Alice to sit nicely rather than climbing under the table. ‘Still there, they’re still all idiots! How’s the … where are you, now?’

‘The charity,’ I said, hoping she wasn’t going to say, ‘What, still?’

‘What, still?’ she said in surprise. ‘I thought that job was a stopgap and you’d be long gone.’

‘Well, I quite like it,’ I said, trying to calm down the inky panic which had dropped into my brain, slowly turning everything black.

‘Good for you,’ Taggie said absently. ‘I guess if you’re happy just doing that, then great.’

Just doing that. Just doing that? Or just doing that? Either way, she said Just. Doing. That. I opened my mouth to say something, but then a pair of hands covered my eyes.

‘Freddy?’ I asked.

‘Hullo,’ my eldest brother said cheerily, plopping into the seat on my other side. All of my siblings were tall, but he was the tallest, and with age his already-broad frame had filled out so he now resembled a stuffed armchair. Add to that the same thick bushy beard and cloud of fluffy hair that all the men on my dad’s side of the family had, and he looked like The Rock cosplaying as a young Santa Claus.

‘How are you?’ I asked politely. ‘I’m sorry to hear about … y’know, Laura.’

‘Ah, thanks,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It’s for the best, y’know? Things haven’t been right for a while.’

‘Yes, I remember you telling me,’ I said sadly. What I didn’t add was ‘when you cornered me outside at my wedding reception, just after the first dance, and talked to me for 45 minutes about how your marriage was a total failure and how you wished you’d gone off with Nicola Burns from sixth form when she’d offered, two months before the wedding’.

Now the table was full, the waiters descended with menus and notepads to take drink orders. I’d been dreading this night for months, but when it came down to it, it was fine: as difficult as it is to get seven adults and five children to behave themselves, we all loved our parents so much that we would even get our horrible children/horrible selves under control if it meant that they could have a pleasant evening with us.

‘It was a good night,’ Dad said thoughtfully the next day, as we sat on opposite ends of the sofa and half-watched an episode of Poirot we’d both seen at least five times before. ‘Nice to see the kids. They’re growing up nicely, aren’t they?’

I thought back to the interactions I’d had with my siblings’ kids last night. Once I’d managed to get the twins’ attention, they’d been only too happy to show me exactly how Elite Beat Agents worked, and cheered me on when they realised I was amazing at it (all those years of saxophone lessons finally paying off). Freddy’s kids, Zach and Bruce, were easy to impress because they were only interested in Pokémon Go and Manchester United, one of which I could talk about for hours and one of which they could talk to me about for hours while I pretended to listen. And Alice, for all her nightmare behaviour at school and for her mum, was a sweetheart who had slipped her hot, sticky hand in mine and read to me from the book she’d brought with her.

To be honest, they’d been my saving grace. After the starters, I’d looked around the table and realised that I was the only one not talking. Dolly and Taggie were chatting earnestly about schools and what various bloggers were saying about homework debates, Freddy was taking my parents through the intricacies of the divorce and the unrealistic demands of his ex, while Andrew was occasionally chiming in to explain exactly how divorces worked even though he’d never had one himself and was, if I recall correctly from his last monologue about how successful he was, an IT consultant rather than a fucking divorce lawyer. After the mains I’d looked around and the groups had switched: Taggie and Andrew were bickering companionably about some technical thing I didn’t understand or care about, Dolly and Dad were talking about Ofsted inspections, and Freddy and Mum were talking about childcare.

I couldn’t join in with these conversations – I didn’t have the experience, the insights, the fucks to give. I don’t have the assurance in my convictions to bicker without being upset, to put forward an opinion that completely contradicts what everyone else thinks without feeling sickeningly guilty for it. Thank God for the twins and their game, for the boys’ endless enthusiasm for talking about Man U, for Alice’s desire to show off to someone who hadn’t admonished her in the past 24 hours! Their kindnesses had been the only things stopping me from needing a quick safety-cry in the toilets, and I wouldn’t have been able to stand the look on Andrew ‘Depression? Just pull yourself together. Do some yoga’s smug-fucking face if I’d come back to the table with wet, red eyes. I was sitting with the people who, by rights, should be closer to and more like me than anyone else in the whole world, but I might as well have been a different species.

I didn’t say this to Dad, obviously. I just smiled and nodded and said, ‘They are.’

‘They’re doing well,’ he said, dunking an entire biscuit in his tea and putting it in his mouth whole. I get my eating habits from my dad, FYI. ‘They all are, they’ve made a good life for themselves.’

‘I have too, Dad,’ I said, bristling. ‘I’ve got good friends, a great marriage, a lovely flat, and my job’s going really great. My boss’s boss, the head of department, is really pleased with me.’

‘Mmm,’ he said, eyes still locked on the TV. Beat. ‘Still, it’s not what you thought you’d be doing, is it?’ On screen, David Suchet was doing something ostentatiously pernickety with his moustache to act as comic relief from the horrific triple-murder going on around him.

‘What do you mean?’ I said slowly, turning to face him. ‘I wanted to be a writer. I’m writing for a living, I’m doing exactly what I wanted to.’

‘I know, but …’ As he tried to think of what to say, his face creased like he was in pain. Maybe he was. Maybe it was the pain of having to concede a point to me, or perhaps trying to figure out how to say what he thought without upsetting his mad, fragile daughter. ‘But it’s not what we thought you’d be writing, is it?’

‘No?’ I said.

We? I thought.

‘No. What you’re writing is great, but it’s beneath you,’ he finished. He looked at me and paused for a second. His face creased again and he shrugged awkwardly, as if about to tell me something against his better judgement. ‘To be honest, I thought you would have published a novel by now.’

‘Oh,’ I said, turning back to the screen. I think Poirot was about to discover a tear in a skirt that, along with the fact the young ingénue was left-handed rather than right-handed, would provide the solution to the whole thing. Very important to concentrate on that and not the fact your father thinks you’re a disappointment, yes. Very important indeed.

‘Don’t think we’re not proud of you. We are,’ Dad was saying, as if from far away. ‘It’s just not where we thought you’d be.’

‘That’s okay,’ I said. But it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t fucking okay. It wasn’t okay that he’d said it, and it wasn’t okay that it was true. ‘It’s not where I thought I’d be, either.’

Wasn’t it? Well, no, because when you’re a little girl and dreaming about where your life will take you, you don’t really think about the fact that mental health charities are going to need youth-facing content producers with some level of seniority, do you? Then you get older, and you move to London and you try to be a writer, and your first job out of uni is writing three hundred 150-word summations of white goods products for a reviews website who clearly don’t care whether you live or die, let alone file on time, and you’re doing it in a miserable flat share with an intimidating German couple, who keep trying to get you to go cycling with them while your best friend is off with her new friends from work and you’ve never felt more alone. So when you’re offered an office job, you take it, because even if it’s not what you’ve dreamed of, it’s human contact and a feeling of some direction, and if you don’t get that this very moment then you think you’ll explode, like an over-inflated balloon, and scare the pigeons. And then you start your job and you get caught up in the endless cycle of meetings and tea breaks and avoiding post-work trips to the pub, and you somehow forget that you dreamed of being a writer and the feeling in your soul when your Year 9 English teacher said she thought you could do it.

So what if you didn’t live up to your childhood dreams? Roisin Lloyd from number 34 isn’t a space dolphin trainer either and we’re not giving her shit for it, are we? Just because I’m not the writer I thought I’d be doesn’t mean I’m a failure, does it?

Does it?

That question was the only thing I could think of all the way through the rest of the programme (it was the pretty woman with the cocaine problem and the fabulous pin-curls who dunnit), through lunch, and through the three unbearably awkward hours before I could get on the train again and leave/go home. When Dad hugged me tightly goodbye at the door and said, ‘Take care of yourself,’ all I could think was, He’s disappointed that I’m not the daughter he thought I’d be. When Mum drove me to the station, waited 20 minutes on the freezing platform with me and waved until the train pulled out of sight, all I thought was, She pities me, and the mess I’ve made of my life. My parents love me so desperately; I can see it in every head ruffle and cup of tea and fierce, watchful gaze, but I wonder if they love the version of me that I could be rather than the person I actually am. The guilt for disappointing them, for being the odd one out in our family, was agony.

I wish I could be the person they wanted me to be, I thought, as I lay my hot face against the cool train window and ignored the man further down the carriage, who was talking to himself and sticking his hands down his trousers. Could I change? Could I be the person that fits in with my siblings, that my parents can be proud of? Maybe. Maybe I could. And maybe, I thought as the fields and houses blurred and the sky outside the window darkened, I should start by writing that novel.

I reached into my bag and retrieved a notebook and pen. Yes, I always have them on me. Maybe, I thought despairingly, that’s a sign that I do agree with Dad – I always carry them just in case I get struck by divine inspiration and start writing the next Harry Potter.

Okay, he’s right: I suck. I’m a big sucky failure, a waste of space, a smear of shit on the Jones family name. God, I hate myself! No, don’t get sucked into a hate spiral, Jones, get working! This is what the To-Do Lists are for – to help you plan and improve and fix problems. You’ve realised that you are a problem, so, let’s fix it.

What shall I write my novel about? I looked around for inspiration. Maybe a train? Thinking about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling wrote her books with a scene in a train station and now everyone loves her, and she’s linked forever to King’s Cross station. And Paddington is linked forever to Paddington! Maybe I should write about a big life event happening in a train station, then, because people will always be reminded of my book when they go there. But which station? Liverpool Street? No, they had that flashmob there in St Trinian’s 2, so it’s kind of been taken. And ABBA got Waterloo years ago. Maybe … maybe Euston! It’s the station I always go to and come home from – after all, it means an awful lot to me. I close my eyes and think of Euston, waiting for inspiration to strike. I think of the dark grey concrete outside and the light grey concrete inside and the … um … rectangular shape … and the Upper Crust, and … Sod it, no, it’s too depressing! Euston is, categorically, the worst station. The only big life event that could realistically happen there is a suicide pact.

Okay, so write what you know. I leant over my tiny grey train table, opened my notebook and just started writing. No planning, no plot, just words. And it felt good, just to let my pen move and not think too hard about where it was going. Look at me, writing my novel! On a train and everything, like proper, cool writers do! I wrote solidly for the hour and 43 minutes it took to get back to London and poured all of my frustrations and self-doubt onto the page. I felt great, I was great! As the train pulled into Euston, I felt a warm rush of pride in myself – which quickly turned acidic as I re-read what I’d written and realised a book about a woman who writes a bestselling novel to get back at her father for saying ‘I thought you’d have published a novel by now,’ and has fabulous success with it is probably not going to get picked up by a publisher.

When I got into Euston I wound my way through the tunnels and down the shadowy stairways of the Underground until I arrived on my platform. I reached behind me so that my fingertips touched the wall. It’s a habit I developed the first time I lost my mind a few years ago, and I still pull it out like a safety blanket whenever I need it. See, if my fingers are touching the wall then I’m grounded, I’m safe. As long as my fingers are touching the wall, I won’t end up on the rails – not because of the force of the train sucking me under as it rushes in, and not because of myself. The number of times I’ve stood with my toes touching the yellow line and realised there’s nothing stopping me from stepping forward onto the track apart from my own will is terrifying. And the thing is, when I feel like this I don’t trust the force of my own will to be enough – it always helps to have a backup.

With a scream and a rush of air, the train thundered towards me and jerked to a stop. I released my breath, pulled my fingers from the wall and found a seat in the middle of the carriage. As the train hurtled into the dark tunnel and towards home, I looked around me and wondered how many of the other passengers knew I felt that a messy end underneath a train might just be preferable to the perfectly normal but seemingly unbearable life I currently led.