The fugues were short absences that I became grateful for, small mercies. Like finally getting to rest after having your eyelids forced open for days. I hid them from my parents and grew out my hair, thinking that the weight dropping from my head would lighten the one inside of me. It worked—not by making anything lighter, no, but by making me feel more balanced, like one weight was pulling the other and the strain on me had been lessened. Perhaps I had just become the fulcrum, the point on which everything hinged, the turning. I don’t know. I just know that I hurt a little less with each inch of hair I refused to cut. Looking back, I really don’t know what I thought it was going to protect me from.

The first thing to change was my sense of style. I was raised a Christian, with a dress code that was smart, conservative and old fashioned – dresses that went all the way up to the neck, down to the wrists, and fell below the knee, topped with no make-up and a wet-look curly perm or straightened hair. It was important to look like a modest, perfectly behaved girl, which I was. We all bought our frilly church-friendly crêpe dresses from a shop in Brixton at the end of Railton Road. The dresses had pleats – the tinier the better. I had a white one that I wore to church and I hated it. Those tiny pleats were hell to iron. You had to try and line four of them up at once then make sure the iron was exactly the right temperature, but once you sat down they would crease and never fall the right way again. I hated that shop because the clothes made us all look the same. By this time, The Kids from Fame were on TV, and we were obsessed. We all wanted to be those leg-warmer-wearing, somersaulting dancers in the show. We also had our minds blown when Jerey Daniel of Shalamar body-popped on Top of the Pops. That was a revelation to us – a completely new style of music, fashion and dancing. The next day we were all trying to ‘pop’. Watching this, we knew our Stepford Wives-style God dresses had to go!

I ended up in Middlesbrough, at Teesside Polytechnic, in 1986, doing an honours degree in Interior Architecture and Design. At its height, in the early 1900s, Teesside Steelworks in North Yorkshire had over ninety-one blast furnaces and was one of the largest steel producers in the world, but by the 1980s, Teesside was a post-industrial area in decline. However, I loved being there, and it was a joy and a relief to be away from Tony. I felt free to reinvent myself again. I was five hours away from London and nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew my background, and I could be who I wanted to be.

I passed my first year comfortably, but in my second year I relaxed and spent more time on my social life than my studies. I got called in by the head of department – a dry, sour man I found intimidating.

‘You’re only here as an experiment,’ he said. ‘You’d better buck up!’

As the only black student on the course, I knew what he meant. In those days there was no one to complain to, and if I had I would have been kicked off the course. My friend and housemate Deborah, who also went to the London College of Furniture, and joined the course a year after me, told me recently that the same tutor gave her such a hard time, downgrading her marks and saying her work wasn’t ‘ethnic enough’. In the end she had to leave Teesside, and said she was traumatised for years.

I’d found myself. Once I’d shaved my head people would look at me, so I had to be confident, to let go of my shyness, and a bold new me emerged. Every time I went to the barbers they whined and complained. They were from a different era: ‘C’mon, baby, you mus’ leave a lickle ’fro fe de man dem’ – they figured I wouldn’t catch a boyfriend with such short hair – so eventually I bought a pair of clippers and learnt how to do it myself, backwards in a hand mirror, and I haven’t needed a barber since.