I didn’t have the same feeling about the money. I could see that there might have been another explanation for that.

“And I said at the time that I thought there were a couple of books gone, do you remember? And we know Jess didn’t take those.”

And they both laughed, then, as if they liked Jess, and liked it that she’d rather jump off a tower-block than read a book.

I could see and feel why it would make a difference to them, this idea that Jen had come into the house for her earrings. It would mean that she had disappeared, gone to Texas or Scotland or Notting Hill Gate, rather than that she’d been killed, or she’d killed herself. It meant that they could think about where she was, imagine her life now. They could wonder about whether she’d had a baby that they’d never seen and might never see, or got a job that they’d never hear about. It meant that in their heads they could carry on being ordinary parents. It’s what I was doing, when I bought Matty his posters and his tapes—I was being an ordinary mother in my head, just for a moment.

You could wreck it all for them in a second, if you chose to, rip enormous great big holes in the story, because what did it add up to, really? Jen could have come back because she wanted to die wearing her earrings. She might not have come back at all. And she was still gone, whether she came back for five minutes or not. Oh, but I know what you need to keep yourself going. That probably sounds funny, considering why we were all there in that coffee bar in the first place. But the fact is that so far I have kept myself going, even if I had to climb the stairs to the roof of Toppers’ House to do it. Sometimes you just need to give things a tiny little jiggle. You just need to think that perhaps someone might have helped themselves to their own earrings, and your part of the world looks like somewhere you could live in for a while.

That was Mr and Mrs Crichton, though, not Jess. Jess didn’t know anything about the earring theory, and Jess was the one who needed her world to look different. She was the one who’d been up on the roof with me. Mr and Mrs Crichton had their jobs and their friends and all the rest of it, so you could say that they didn’t need any stories about earrings. You could say that stories about earrings were wasted on them.

You could say all that, but it wouldn’t be true. They needed the stories—you could see it in their faces. I only know one person in the world who doesn’t need stories to keep himself going, and that person is Matty. (And maybe even he does. I don’t know what goes on in there. Keep talking to him, they say, so I do, and who knows whether he uses something I say?) And there are other ways of dying, without killing yourself. You can let parts of yourself die. Jess’s mother had let her face die, and I watched it come to life again.

The first train that came along was southbound, and I got off at London Bridge and went for a walk. If you’d seen me leaning on the wall and looking down at the water, you’d have gone, Oh, she’s thinking, but I wasn’t. I mean, there were words in my head, but just because there are words in your head it doesn’t mean you’re thinking, just like if you’ve got a pocket full of pennies it doesn’t mean you’re rich. The words in my head were like, bollocks, bastard, bitch, shit, fuck, wanker, and they were spinning round in there pretty fast, too fast even for me to make a sentence out of them. And that’s not really thought, is it?

So I watched the water for a little while, and then I went to a stall by the bridge and bought some tobacco and papers and matches. Then I went back to where I’d been standing and sat down to roll myself a few smokes, for something to do, sort of thing. I don’t know why I don’t smoke more, to be honest. I forget, I think. If someone like me forgets to smoke, what chance has smoking got? Look at me. You’d bet any money that I smoked like fuck, and I don’t. New Year’s Resolution: smoke more. It’s got to be better for you than jumping off of tower-blocks.

Anyway, so there I was, sitting down with my back against the wall, rolling up roll-ups, when I saw this lecturer from college. He’s like an old bloke, one of those art-school people who’ve been knocking around since the sixties. He teaches typography and that, and I went to a couple of his classes until I got bored. I don’t mind him, Colin. He doesn’t have a grey pony-tail and he doesn’t wear a faded denim jacket. And he never wanted to be our friend, which must mean that he has his own friends. You couldn’t say that about some of them.

To tell this story truthfully, I should probably say that he saw me before I saw him, because when I looked up from my rolling, he was walking over to me. And to be really properly truthful, I should also say that some of the thinking I was doing, in other words the mental swearing, probably wasn’t entirely mental, if you see what I mean. It was meant to be mental, but some of it was coming out through my mouth, just because there was so much of it. It was sort of slopping out of me, as if the swearing was coming out of a tap and running into a bucket (my head), and I hadn’t bothered turning the tap off even when the bucket was full.

That’s what it looked like from my point of view. From his point of view, it looked like I was sitting on the pavement rolling up fags and swearing to myself, and that’s not such a good look, is it? He kind of came up to me, and then he crouched down so he was at my height, and then he started talking to me quietly. And he was like, Jess? Do you remember me?

I’d only seen him like two months before, so of course I remembered him. And I went, No, and laughed, which was supposed to be a joke, but which couldn’t have come across as a joke, because then he goes, still in this whispery voice, I’m Colin Wearing, and I used to teach you at art college. And I go, Yeah, yeah, and he goes, No, I am, and then I see that he thought my Yeah, yeah was like Yeah, right, but it wasn’t that sort of Yeah, yeah. All I was doing with the two Yeahs was trying to tell him that I’d only been joking before, but I only made it worse. I made it look like I thought he was pretending to be Colin Wearing, which would be an utterly insane thing to do. So the whole conversation is going right off course. It’s like a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, because all the time I’m thinking, this should be easy to push along, and everything I say just takes me in the wrong direction.

And he goes, Why are you here, sitting on the path? And I tell him that I’d had a row with my fucking mother about some earrings, and he was like, And now you can’t go home? And I said that I could if I wanted to. I could just get on the Northern Line back to Angel and then jump on a bus. But I didn’t want to. And he went, Well, I don’t think you should sit here. Is there anywhere you can go? And then I realized that he thought I had turned into like a nutter, so I stood up quickly, which made him jump, and I gave him a mouthful and walked away.

But then I did think, as opposed to swear mentally. And the first thing I thought was that it would be very easy for me to be a nutter. I’m not saying it would be a piece of piss, living that life—I don’t mean that. I just mean that I had a lot in common with some of the people you see sitting on pavements swearing and rolling cigarettes. Some of them seemed to hate people, and I hated just about everyone. They must have pissed off their friends and family, and I’d pretty much done that. And who knows whether Jen’s a nutter now? Maybe it runs in the genes, although with my dad being a junior Education minister, maybe it’s one of those things that skips a generation.

And I didn’t know where all this thinking was leading to, but I could see suddenly that I was in more trouble than I had thought. I know that sounds stupid, considering I’d thought about killing myself, but that was all just for a laugh, and if I’d jumped it would have been for a laugh, too. What if I had a future on this planet, though? What then? How many people could I piss off, and how many places could I run away from, before I found myself sitting by the river and swearing externally 4 real? Not many more, was the answer.