Black Dog

You will have noticed that I'm generally fairly up. But every now and then I fall into the clutches of the black dog of depression, and it floors me. It doesn't last that long, I'm pleased to say, so that I always know that I just have to get through it and I'll be cracking jokes as usual, but while I'm there it's not good.

While I've never, ever considered ending it all by topping myself, there have been a number of times when I've considered how easy it would be just to walk away from everything. I never would, naturally, as I'm far too responsible for that, but every now and then it's a tempting thought.

Now since I'm not a teenager burdened with too much make-up and an unnatural desire for negative attention, I'm not going to detail the ins and outs of my tussle with the dog. I am instead going to give you the opening of my current work in progress, the idea of which came to me in a previous, very similar, episode in my life.

Given all that followed, it is ironic that the most formative experience of my early life happened to someone else. After all, if the body lying partially hidden among the waste bins behind the Tudor Rose Hotel had been mine, as it should have been, as it was intended to be, then the existential crisis that led me to where I am today wouldn't really have cropped up.

They should have discovered me there, Claire, crushed and bloody. But instead it was Heidi, an exchange student from Hamburg earning a little extra money to indulge her passion for Miss Selfridge and glass paperweights, who was struck with a baseball bat on the back of the neck by a large, aggressive, but sentimental petty criminal. It was her family who were deprived of the chance to see her flower into womanhood and middle age, while I am heading stolidly in that direction.

I was coming out of a club in Bristol at the time of the murder, going through the lyrics of Joan Armatrading's "Walk under Ladders", and reflecting once again what an underrated artist she was, how absurd it was that she hadn't achieved the popular success of the likes of Culture Club. Entertaining as they were, they couldn't hold a candle to her for lyrical power. She had a profile, it’s true, but it was a low-key one. I comforted myself that their light would blaze and go out, but hers would be like the Olympic Flame. Later I traced the timing back to that one moment, that specific train of thought, and marvelled that I was unable to sense the life of a colleague, a friend even by some definitions, being snuffed out.

If Heidi had said 'no' when I asked her to swap shifts so that I could go and see Joan Armatrading at the Locarno; if Joan Armatrading had had a sore throat and had to cancel; if there hadn’t been a spare ticket for me in the first place, it wouldn’t have been Heidi pulling up her coat collar against the winter chill as she locked the kitchen door at midnight, relieved to be away from the smell of chip fat and looking forward to a beer and a cuddle with her rather thick English boyfriend in the comfort of her own flat. And I, Claire, would be dead.

Then it would have been my parents sitting, blotchy and stunned, in the pew-like seats of the court, listening to the evidence of how their daughter had been killed - the physical details, the scene of crime reports, the events leading up to it. Only it wouldn't have been so senseless, because it wouldn't have been a mistake. The events leading up to it wouldn't have been events that occurred in someone else's life. So they wouldn't have been able to turn their empty faces to another, similar, young woman, blaming her, all the while knowing that there was no reason to do so, but seeming guiltily almost to wish that if they looked hard enough at her the dreadful mistake might be rectified in retrospect.

If Heidi and I hadn't shared an enthusiasm for the same shade of a well-known hair colorant, if we hadn't been such slaves to fashion that we'd both rushed out to buy that black wool coat recommended in Cosmo, if Heidi had been a little thinner, or a little fatter, then perhaps he'd have realised I wasn't there, postponed the murder for a night, gone home and had a cup of tea and realised that it was an overreaction to want to crush the life out of me, to shatter my skull just because I warned Stephanie about him.

But then if Stephanie had never decided to overcome her natural disinclination to talk to unsuitable men in pubs, determined to quash her tendency to judge people by their looks, or if she'd picked instead the weedy, anoraked Mummy's boy whom she'd never normally have spoken to either, then perhaps Heidi would still be alive and so would I. Perhaps Mark Hunter would have met another girl, in his own time, in his own way; maybe she'd have shown him it didn't have to be like this. Maybe he'd have given up the gear, gone into rehab, got himself a job somewhere, settled down and had children, watched TV of an evening and warned his kids about the perils of drugs. Instead of doing life in Broadmoor.

And had I not decided that a seaside town was the ideal place to spend my summer holidays in 1985, surfing by day and washing dishes by night, then confronted fifteen years later with the opportunity to become someone else, maybe like most people I would have decided against it, wouldn't have taken Heidi's name and wouldn't now be living with one foot in fact and the other in fiction.