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Closing the door is a calm affair but I am dizzy, hair spiky with cold and the wind outside, reeking of smoke. The shops are closed and don't open tomorrow. A picture appears in my head: cement and brick.I am walled in like an adulterous nun till Monday. The garden from the kitchen window looks like a set for a film about Passchendale. I make tea. The thought of the cake in my stomach makes me sweat.

What will I do while I'm lasting Marianne? What will I do?

The day my friend Marianne left for America, I found a note pinned to the kitchen wall. It was there when I came back from the airport without her along with some books of poems, addresses, a foreign phone number, money and a bottle of gin. The gin and the money went long since. The note is till there.

I hear every radio programme at least twice. I can recite the news by the time I go to bed. Besides I have to move around while I'm listening. This is not an occupation on its own.

TV is tricky: the news is depressing and the programmes sometimes worse. I hate adverts. They are full of thin women doing exercises and smiling all the time. They make me guilty.

The water takes ages for a bath. I hate waiting.

It's asking for trouble to listen to music alone.

I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.

Writing is problematic. I cover paper with words as fast as painting. Sometimes it's indecipherable and I throw it away.

Visiting is awkward. The place I live is an annexe of nowhere and besides, I don't like to wish myself on anyone.

Walking is awful. I do that when I want to feel worse. I always run.

Sewing and going for a meal. Tricky juxtaposition.

I used to sew a lot. It occupied me. During the day I went to work in the school and in the evenings I cut cloth. I cut cloth into shapes from paper and then sewed it together again. Needles punctured pincushions into my finger ends and left little scratches on my wrists alongside the bruises from shifting furniture, sears from the oven and tears in my nails from cleaning. Domestic wounds. I sewed at the table from when I came back from work to when I thought bed-time should be. At intervals, according to the clock, I would prepare something to eat: maybe a can of soup, a sandwich. Functional food. One evening, I was so intent on a hem, I forgot. When I did look at my watch, it was well after the usual meal-time. Hunger hadn't interrupted. I sat and thought about this for a while.

There was a can of vegetable soup in the cupboard: individual size. I found the opener and dug it into the top, lifting it higher with each turn of the handle. Some of the stuff inside smeared on my knuckle. It felt slimy, unpleasant. Inside the can the surface was a kind of flattened jelly, dark red with bits of green and yellow poking through. Watery stuff like plasma started seeping up the sides of the viscous block. It didn't look like food at all. I slid one finger into it to the depth of a nail. The top creased and some of the pink fluid slopped up and over the jagged lip of the can. It was sickening but pleasantly so. Like a little kid playing with mud. The next thing I knew, I'd pushed my hand right inside the can. The semi-solid mush seethed and slumped over the sides and onto the worktop as my nails tipped the bottom and the torn rim scored the skin. I had to withdraw carefully. Soup stung into the cuts so I used my other hand and scooped up as much of the mess as I could and cradled it across the room, red soup and blood dripping onto the lino. There, my cupped hands over the sink, I split my fingers and let the puree slither, spattering unevenly onto the white porcelain. I was learning something as I stared at what I was doing; the most obvious thing yet it had never dawned on me till I stood here, bug-eyed at the sink, congealing soup up to my wrists. I didn't need to eat.

I didn't need to eat.