I haven’t left the house on my own for over a year.

Not since my GCSEs went so horribly wrong and I gave up on … life. Being outside, like this, is a big deal. It’s not something I’d have forgotten.

I groan again. This is more of a lost-my-keys-down-the-drain kind of groan than a war-hero groan. The nausea has kicked in. The thing about epilepsy that everyone knows about – the seizures – aren’t so bad because you’re not there for that bit. It’s the way it feels before and the way it feels after that really sucks. It’s like I’m about to throw up and fall asleep and dismantle myself all at the same time. I’m guessing it’s about mid-morning, which means I may as well write off the rest of the day.

I can’t get over the fact that no one has stopped to help.

The last time I passed out in this part of town, I woke up to find an off-duty nurse moments away from giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

If I’d only pretended to be unconscious a moment longer…

Don’t judge, I was fifteen – what did you expect?

Anyway, I threw up all over her instead.

But today: nothing. I suppose that was two years ago; I was a kid and nobody likes to see a kid passed out on the street. It’s different now. I don’t exactly look like an adult but maybe I look old enough for everyone to assume I’ve passed out from too much drink or drugs. That would explain why everyone’s walking right past me like I don’t exist.

I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or offended.

Then someone does stop and I wish instantly they hadn’t. I don’t see him coming; I notice him suddenly, standing right in front of me, staring at me. He looks a little surprised and a little worried and a little pleased all at the same time, like he’s staring at an Amazon package on his front step that he wasn’t expecting.

He’s a small, grey, rusty rake of a man. The scar on his head cuts a knotted track from temporal lobe to frontal lobe: a gruesome, twisted stretch of pinkish scalp where the hair will never grow back. It must be an injury, I think. I reach up and touch the small ridge of bone on my own scalp where the surgeon corkscrewed a hole in my head and cut out the epileptogenic lesion in my temporal lobe.

“Keep moving,” the man says, sounding kindlier than I’d expected.

“Wha—?”

“Keep moving or he’ll sniff you out.”

Fear rumbles inside me. His voice is so quiet I really shouldn’t be able to hear him but somehow I do. The sound and the colour of the rest of the world pales.

“You’re not where you think you are,” the man continues, urgent now. “When you figure that out, all you’ll want to do is close your eyes and wait it out. But you can’t, do you hear me? You’ve got to keep moving.”

Keep moving? I’m about to ask him what in seven-shades-of-hell he’s talking about when a woman comes up behind him.

Thirties, quite well-dressed, a bit school-teachery. She doesn’t see me, or she ignores me if she does. “Dad,” she says, taking his arm. “Come on, we need to get going.”

I watch them leave. For some reason I’m thinking about the time I was clearing out the garage with Grandad before he died. I upended an old armchair and a dead mouse hit the floor. I remember the shock, the cold drench. It wasn’t a mouse anymore, not exactly. Its insides had turned to dust decades ago. It was a dried up, furry husk with milky, unseeing eyes fixed on mine.

That’s what the man reminded me of: a husk, with nothing but dust and spiders inside him.

I pull myself up to standing and the world rocks around me like it’s trying to shrug me off. I fish in my back pocket and I’m relieved to find my phone. I’ve never been robbed while I’m unconscious – I guess all the arm waving puts people off – but it’s something I think about. Anything can happen while you’re out. It’s like leaving your front door wide open. Except it’s not your house you leave unattended, it’s you.

My phone is dead, the screen dark. I press the power button again anyway. Nothing. Maybe it broke when I fell.

I let my head fall back and stare hopelessly at the cloudless sky.

Nothing is easy after a seizure. My eyes don’t work right, my fingers don’t work right. I’m only a twenty-minute walk from home but I might as well be on Mars.

The smart move would be to beg a passer-by to borrow their phone and call Mum. She’ll be working her shift at the local Waitrose right now and if I call her she’ll be in the car and down here in about three minutes flat, Liquorice Allsorts in hand.

Mum’s great in a crisis, I guess she’s had a lot of practice.

Or I could just walk?

It sounds simple, but trust me, it’s not. I might pass out again, or step into traffic. I’m scared. But I can’t shake the old man’s words.

Keep moving.

Something is off. Something about the weird old head-wound guy and the fact that nobody is even looking at me.

Keep moving.

I’m probably not thinking straight. I never make good decisions when I’m post-seizure, but all the same…

I need to go.

My blood feels like it’s boiling, my arms and legs twitch with the urge to start walking. I slip my phone into my pocket and point myself towards home. This is brave, I think. The first brave thing I’ve done in a long time.

I used to have this idea that epilepsy was just one thing about me. It didn’t have to define me; I could still have a life. I convinced myself it all came down to my GCSEs. They were the first great hurdle, I thought, the doorway to the rest of my life. I was going to nail my GCSEs and crush my A-levels and then I was going to get the hell out of this place. London. New York. Tokyo. Somewhere alive. Somewhere where the universe was actually paying attention.

But then my GCSEs came around, epilepsy took its chance to give me the biggest kick in the teeth it could and all my grand plans got scrubbed.

TWO

Most people with epilepsy get auras before they have a seizure. Visual disturbances, vertigo, distorted sensations. When I was little, my aura used to look like a person. I’d catch sight of something in the corner of my eye and turn to see a willowy man standing in the doorway next to me. Long and taut, with muscles on his arms and legs that stood out like twisted rope. I could never see his face, even when it was clear daylight, but I could tell, somehow, that he was watching me. He’d tilt his head to the side like he didn’t quite understand me. I’d freeze, my breath like a marble in my throat, until—

I’d open my eyes and Mum would be leaning over me, shouting, looking petrified. I didn’t know about epilepsy then. I used to think I passed out through sheer terror. But then Mum took me to the doctor and after a bunch of tests I got my diagnosis.

I stopped seeing the man after I started medication, but I still feel him. Now, my aura starts with a blue-grey tinge at the edges of my vision, followed by a rushing sensation, a sense of falling but not moving, as if the world is rearing up around me. And then there it is: the fear. Unreasoning and inhuman. The unshakable belief that somebody – something – is standing just outside my line of sight.

I walk on. The air is damp, the sky is a flat sheet of grey that looks like it’s welded to the grey of the roads and the poxy grey pebble-dashed houses. My vision is still messed up, blurry in some places and not in others, like one of those tilt-shift photos that make real-sized houses look like perfect doll-sized toys.

Home is twenty minutes away.

Home. My room. My emergency pack of Liquorice Allsorts.

I reach the roundabout at the edge of the town centre. There aren’t many people. The one or two I can see are on the opposite side of the road, so far ahead or behind they look like blurry smudges of oil in a Lowry painting.

Cars whip round the roundabout and hit the dual carriageway at a hundred miles an hour. I feel them more than I see them, a kind of whhmm as they go past, shaking the fence that divides the lanes and sending blasts of cold, gritty air right through me.

According to quantum mechanics, objects aren’t really there until you observe them. I learned this from YouTube, not my physics GCSE, by the way. What we call reality is just one way of looking at the world. If you listen to Heisenberg, objects only exist in relation to other objects. When they’re not interacting, they’re not really there.

Epilepsy brain. Sorry.

Thinking about physics keeps me calm and calm is good because anxiety is a major trigger for my seizures. Although, to be fair, so is hunger, lack of sleep, norovirus, physical discomfort in any form and the weather forecast in Paraguay. That last one is a joke … as far as I know.