Page 33 of Who’s That Girl?

The words come tumbling out before I can stop them, and hearing my worst fear out loud in the doctor’s surgery makes it suddenly real and I’m scared. Really scared.

Dr Evans, on the other hand, doesn’t flinch. ‘I see …’ Raising his tufty white eyebrows, he scribbles something down on his pad. I crane my neck to try and see what he’s writing, but of course it’s indecipherable. ‘And what makes you think that?’ he asks pleasantly, as if he’s discussing the weather.

I take a deep breath as my mind flicks back to yesterday. ‘I’ve been having these hallucinations,’ I reply, trying to keep my voice steady.

He continues scribbling. ‘Can you describe them for me?’

I take a deep breath. ‘I saw myself aged twenty-one.’

There, I’ve said it.

Only instead of the jaw-dropping, gripping-on-to-the-side-of-the-chair astonishment I’d been expecting, Dr Evans’s face relaxes and he smiles ruefully. ‘Oh, that happens to us all as we get older,’ he says blithely.

I look at him in confusion. ‘It does?’

‘Indeed.’ He nods. ‘I fool myself into imagining I’m twenty-one again on many an occasion, until I look in the mirror.’ He chuckles, flattening down his wisps of white hair.

‘No, you don’t understand,’ I try again. ‘This was real,’ I tell him urgently. ‘Plus I’ve been having headaches,’ I add, clutching at my temples. ‘Terrible, agonising headaches.’

OK, they’re not that bad, but you always need to exaggerate a bit when you see the doctor.

Dr Evans glances up sharply and looks at me, suddenly concerned. ‘So you have to lie in a darkened room?’

See.

‘Well, no, not exactly—’

‘Nausea and vomiting?’

I hesitate. A little bit of exaggeration is one thing; bare-faced lying is another.

‘Actually, I’m usually fine after a couple of paracetamol.’

His eyes narrow.

‘Although sometimes I have to take three,’ I add hastily.

‘Miss Merryweather, I need to ask you some questions.’

‘OK.’ I nod, bracing myself.

‘Have you ever suffered a seizure?’

Immediately I have a flashback to last week when I opened my credit-card bill, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count. ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘Never.’

‘Memory loss?’

‘Well, I forgot my dad’s birthday,’ I confess, glancing down at my hands in my lap, which are twisting up a tissue. ‘But I’ve been really busy at work and it just slipped my mind.’

Dr Evans makes another scribble on his pad. ‘And how many hours do you spend in the office a day?’

‘Um, six. No, eight. No …’ I try counting up on my fingers. ‘A lot.’

He makes yet another scribble. ‘Do you get eight hours of sleep a night?’

‘Does anyone?’ I quip wearily. Despite twelve hours of drug-induced sleep, I’m still exhausted.

‘Do you eat three square meals a day?’