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The surgery bed I was lying on was tilted so far back I thought I was going to slip off. There was a mirror on the wall. I looked at my unkempt grey hair and tired face and hardly recognized myself. I looked like a faded person. I avoided mirrors, where possible.

They were trying to reverse the blood flow in my legs, you see. I was more covered in blue veins than a chunk of Gorgonzola and I needed to get them done. Not because of how they looked, but because they were making my calves itch and giving me sores. My aunt had died of a blood clot which broke free and achieved the lofty status of a fatal pulmonary embolism, so I wanted to get the varicose veins sorted before a clot of my own arrived with similar ambitions. I am sorry if this is too much information. I'm just determined to be as honest as possible with you, so I am starting as I mean to go on.

Truthfully.

So, as I listened to the radio, the vascular surgeon injected me multiple times with local anesthetic along the length of my left leg the final injection she fondly but accurately named the bee sting. Then we got to the main part where, she told me, a catheter would be inserted into my calf to blast my great saphenous vein from the inside with 120°C of sauté-an-onion heat.

You should be able to feel something...

And I did feel it. It wasn't pleasant, but it was something. The truth was that I hadn't really felt much for years. Just a vague lingering sadness. Anhedonia. Do you know that word? The inability to feel pleasure. An unfeeling. Well, that had been me for some time. I have known depression, and it wasn't that. It didn't have the intensity of depression. It was just a lack. I was just existing. Food was just there to fill me up. Music had become nothing more than patterned noise. I was simply, you know, there.

You should be able to feel something.

I mean, that's the most basic and essential form of existence, isn't it? Feeling. And to live without feeling, then what was that? What was that? It was like just sitting there. Like a table in a closed restaurant, waiting for ever for someone to occupy the furniture.

And for once, it wasn't very hard to think of something. And the main thing I was focusing on was a letter I had received from a solicitor's office less than two hours before.

The letter had been an unusual one.

It had informed me that I had been left a property in Ibiza, Spain, belonging to someone called Christina van der Berg. This Christina van der Berg had died and left me her worldly goods. Or some of them, at least. Another scam, I thought. You see, when people have stolen from you, it is hard not to see the world as a den of thieves. But even if I hadn't been scammed, it was ridiculous to imagine that someone I had never known would bequeath me a house in the Mediterranean.

It took me a while to understand that this is not exactly what had happened. Or, to put it another way, it took me a while to realize Christina van der Berg was not a stranger. Not exactly. The trouble was that the name had rung precisely zero bells. The Dutch element van der Berg added a kind of grandness that seemed fictional and unfamiliar, and it had thrown me off. Luckily, though, the letter from Nelson and Kemp Solicitors gave some further information, including a fleeting mention of this Christina's maiden name: Papadakis.

Now, that did ring a bell.

Christina Papadakis had been, for a very short while, a music teacher. We had worked at the same school together just before I got back with Karl. (We'd been together at university, but he had been in too much of a rush, so I'd called a hiatus.)

I must admit I didn't know her very well at all. I remember her as a very beautiful and shy young woman, with an air of glamour, which was a rarer quality back in 1979 than it is now. She had a heavy fringe and long dark hair and wore beads. She reminded me of the singer Nana Mouskouri, but without the glasses. Her father had emigrated from Greece as a young man just after the war. Apparently she had never been to Greece, but she seemed the epitome of Mediterranean sophistication to my provincial land-locked brain. And she did miss the food she had known growing up amid the Greek community in London the first time I'd ever heard the word 'halloumi' in my life was out of her mouth. She always ate a lot of fruit. For instance, she would produce these elegantly crafted pineapple slices not chunks from her lunch box and that always impressed me. I once walked past her door while she was singing 'Rainy Days And Mondays' and the class were all open-mouthed in awe. Her voice was on a par with Karen Carpenter (another singer from Triassic times). The kind of voice that seems to still the air and time itself.

Anyway, one evening close to the Christmas holidays I had stayed late at school, adding tinsel to a display on trigonometry, and on the hunt for more staples I found her at her desk. She was sitting there, picking at her nails.