During weekdays, at the London College of Furniture, I felt free to explore my new self, but at weekends when I saw Tony I softened my appearance. A change of look can happen quickly, but changing on the inside is a more gradual process. On the outside, I was a trendy college student, but in my head I was still the good Christian girl wanting to keep everyone happy. As I look back, I know that I had zero interest in Tony. The fact was I didn’t know how to say no to him; it was that simple. We didn’t do anything or go anywhere, and I don’t recall him ever taking me to a restaurant or a movie like normal couples. He’d pick me up from my home in Brixton, drive me all the way to north London, and we’d watch telly in his room. That was our relationship. I was so meek I didn’t have any voice at all.

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.

We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life I’d imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which he’d always valued and loved. Yes, my brother’s words stung –look how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.

You think you’re surrounding yourself with people and making your life easier. But in reality you’re just isolating yourself from the real world, and, in my experience at least, the more isolated you are from reality – the more removed you become from the person you’re naturally supposed to be – the harder you’re making your life and the less happy you become. You end up with something like a medieval court, with you as the monarch and everyone around you jockeying for position, scared of losing their place in the pecking order and fighting each other to see who can be closest to you, who can exert the most influence on you. It’s a grotesque, soul-destroying environment to live in. And you’ve created it yourself.

I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me; nor had I ever belonged to any place. That was also why, as a child, I was fascinated by the body. Perhaps, I thought, I could belong inside my own body. Perhaps I could know the streams of the veins in my wrists the way other people knew the streams in which they swam as children. Perhaps I could know the names of the bones in the back of my hand the way other people knew the names of the back roads that were shortcuts home. I could know the rhythm of my pulse like my friend Dan knew the rhythm of the approaching train in his hometown, the rhythm he woke up to and went to sleep to and hoped would lead him somewhere else someday. I never did get to know my body that way.