I left London in the freezing rain and by the time I reached the outskirts of Brighton the snow had begun to fall, giant fuzzy felts of it on my windscreen. I’ll e-mail you the rest,” he said before hanging up. “Some woman has disappeared in Brighton, police are holding a press conference. Robbie, my news editor, barking his orders down the phone. It was a one-way conversation, the kind that often marked the start of my working day. Maybe I see it because the flower has always reminded me of you, of us. But the sunflower, in winter? I can see it as clearly now as I can see my hand in front of me.
I do believe, though, that the sky and the waves were as I have described them. What we see is not necessarily how things are. And the violet of the sky, the way it looked electric, like it had been plugged into a vast source of negative energy.īut the mind plays tricks. In my box of memories from January the twenty-second, 2007, these are the things you’ll see: a single sunflower in a garden, the waves, the huge yawning jaws of them thrashing under ripe clouds. The seeds of what happened then were planted years before. I used to think, Oh, that was the day when everything changed, but of course it’s never that simple.
My story starts on a Monday morning in January because it’s the obvious place to begin.
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