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All that is written here is an understanding. A limited understanding, pieced together from broken memories, old notes and much supposition. Who knows? It may be completely mistaken, represent partial truths, or be more or less true. Sad to say, I was never given the honour of an explanation.

As far as I know, those events began the day a girl who walked home in the same direction as me got her protectors. I earned my humiliation that day with just a few strokes of a fountain pen on watercolour paper — an idiotic, childlike letter asking if she would be my friend. I started that day optimistically and went home feeling suicidal.

That was the day she transformed from a loner like me — always on the periphery, always walking ten metres ahead — to one flanked by watchful young men who demanded she sit amongst them. We might ask ourselves today, “Did that girl need protectors?” For she seemed thoroughly modern, independent. But such was the racism and parochialism of her defenders, always ready to defend the honour of a beige girl, whether that was her world or not.

My humiliation was total, but worse still, I had unwittingly wandered into a world I didn’t know existed. From that day forth, every non-white girl in the college would be defended against me, suddenly cast as a predator to be vanquished. Which was odd, because I was just a nerd trying to make friends with someone I thought was lonely like me.

The narrative grew. A fuss erupted when I helped two Bosnian refugee students access college computers at our tutor’s request. Simple acts of kindness became suspect. By my second year, I found myself studying alongside two girls who seemed to know every detail of those events I desperately wanted to forget. One, I later learned, was the sister of that girl’s primary defender.

My confusion deepened when I defended one of these girls from my friends’ mockery of her appearance. They could only interpret this as attraction, not basic human decency. This became their endless joke until I nearly believed it myself — despite knowing she despised me, despite not realising her brother was the self-appointed guardian of every young woman’s honour.

Reality began to blur. In the company of two friends, the girl seemed intent on destroying me. With another, she transformed. Alone, there was that lingering gaze, not hostile at all. My emotionally immature mind couldn’t reconcile these versions of her.

One friend tried to wake me from this delusion. When I planned to speak to her after Easter break, having convinced myself I had nothing to lose, he intervened. That was the day I learned her brother would “snap my spine and break it into a hundred pieces” if I so much as said hello. My friend was adamant: this was no jest.

I walked away, but couldn’t forget. Months later, isolated in a Cambridge bedsit, it became my sole obsession. I had no cultural awareness, no understanding that she might have been promised to somebody, that she could have been married or engaged. I just took it personally and sank deeper into depression.

A year after his warning, that same friend decided to tell me everything. “She was an active participant,” he barked. Those gazes weren’t affection — they were bait, waiting for me to respond so karma could take its course. There was no love there; only hate.

This was hard to hear, especially as I’d just written twenty-six chapters chronicling my imagined version of her, crowned with a poem of praise. His account seemed implausible, yet he insisted on its truth. If only I had listened to “All That You Have Is Your Soul” on that cross-channel ferry, instead of “Matters of the Heart.”