Not long after the dinner, I am hospitalised, appendicitis, the doctors doing their magic while I lie in cardigans, a bed of white linens, grape-eating and offensively incited. That’s all. I am not well liked. In truth I am abhorred. For my dusty neighbours I writhe too poetically, catch their ire. Their big-band coughs and rose-gold colostomy bags. All afternoon I move like a snake. But at night I perch in my skin.

It is my destiny to dream of courtyards. Fate or fever. For days I peer down at dusky cobbles, sombre undying blue. I have the best aerial views from my rental turret, all night taking in the lavender mountains that spangle the bedheads, the drips. One evening I struggle with my medicines. A nurse says, Swallow it. It might have been my father, that tone. At home in the valley. If it was born in your mouth it can go down your throat. Except we never call him father. And never once has he raised his voice.

Every hour I hear footsteps in the leaves, the buffed and strip-lit corridors. A nurse, my parents, my sister, myself. They will arrive after work, after they’ve pressed all their grapes. For they live on a farm, in the valley where I was born. A farm not a vineyard. A little kingdom with no cattle. Our soils are rich but our trees are diseased. There is an incredible continuous wind, thick ropes of turbulence. We boat our sentences over it. In spring we spot spoonbills, lone ramblers flattening fescue grass on their way to the woods. Nothing happens. Nobody harms us. We have our jigsaws and our spaghetti and our Ancient Greek.

At one-fifteen I see doctors, preening other patients’ diagrams, bar graphs showing periodicity, long lines with unsettling end behaviours. Please stand and jump, they say, but I cannot, then you have appendicitis. And I am wheeled away, horizontally: theatre, spotlights, a little planetarium, nightfall. Then nothing. Then blood, so slick. Around the wound a decorative gore, bright garnish, so much of it, which strikes me as anachronistic, when I am revived, as if from smelling salts in some long-ago century.

For a little while I cease to exist. Do my time in the special void? As soon as I am conscious again, I count the red grapes that accumulate at my bedside. Grapes or raisins. Dried fruits that look as though they’ve been plucked from a riverside in Hades. For days I press the buzzer, a religious zeal. Tell my tales. On the surface I am regal, pompous, unbreakable. And beneath I choke with fear. Dutifully, I suppress. I do my whimpering where it belongs, where it matters. I do my whimpering in the blood.

Please recall your evening, your terrible sensations. I had been gulping with abandon at a restaurant in the valley. Rice fusion, a long stained teak floor. I swam to the table, my prehistoric fingers, my adoring parents. Whisked beetroot risotto to paste. I was so tranquil then. A man on the table opposite beckoned the waiter but it is not our family’s style to get involved. He said, the spoons are too bevelled. He said, the spoons are bevelled in a way that offends. I carried on torquing my dinner until the room staggered, tipped. I saw scales or armour. Dragnets or ceiling tiles.

I am a person cursed to remember tears. Alive to every drop. I have the feeling my parents were in agony, at war with the council. There is planning permission for a telecommunications mast outside their home and it wounds them. But I didn’t want to talk about application 17/2335212482v3 for a phase 8 monopole, wraparound cabinets and associated ancillary works – or about discounted Georgian-style doors with sunburst lead inlays and crenelated glass. I wanted only to talk about me. I brought up my recent achievement, the medal I’d invented, before the lights went out and I awoke here, hungry and prawn-shaped, and wobbling in the darkness.

For days I await my dishonourable discharge, as if from Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, rather than the local infirmary. My chest is swampy, half-full, clattering, in recovery from life rather than from appendicitis, something I explain to the tired nurses in the evening-time, over and over, chronicling myself half-sincerely as the sun sets like blood on the endless carpark. Had I noticed my appendix was inflamed in the restaurant? No, though I was unusually stirred. Dining will do that to you. To dine is to invite nostalgia. To dine is to welcome catastrophe.

But here’s the truth: there is a problem with my accent. Too thin, too ratified. Once, long ago, my emphasis was in decline. I’d been swallowing flat vowels in the North of England but I regurgitate them now. A fraud, I’ve clawed my way up disgracefully into new cadences, pretending never to have kicked a ball or owned a season ticket or loved a grandad who signed his name with an X. I bore strangers with tales of my imaginary mother, her triumphs. On Mondays she is a fortune teller, a priest, and later in the week an addict, virtuoso, a lumberjack, a ghost, has died of consumption. She walks hauntingly, both as though she has already passed over and as though she is still lithe and sprightly, an acrobat of unprecedented agility, a star. I am struggling to remember whom I’ve lied to; whose affection I’ve concocted myself out of. Each scenario, the same basic hue. What a comfort to me, this thrilling consistency.

Another genteelism. For I call them Mum and Dad. Now bounding through light countryside, now piercing that bloodstained sunset. They will stop on their way to me to take photographs. Climb down from their carriage and wind up the camera, the horses silhouetted against cindered clouds. Except it is the turn of the millennium and they will in fact be on the bus, the 33a from down in the valley, the one whose driver I grew up with and calls everyone son, though he is in most cases their junior, and who takes puffs of his e-cig in autumnal laybys while passengers gawp longingly at the vaulted wall of the moors.

Now the plasterboard sheds its pastel colours, its lavenders, lilacs, peaches, and I am free to sob. This I do into a pillow, to save my neighbours’ embarrassment, the embarrassment, over and over, of rooming next to me. And I explain to the nurses, as they wipe my brow and refuse to sketch me, that I am famous, in a way, the recipient of a grant, unmerited, for my work in genome mapping, untrue, every fragment.