I knew exactly what Moseley was talking about.

It was a memory that was so painful, that so conflicted with my current image of myself, that I kept it locked away in a consciousness-proof box. Sometimes, the memories seeped into my dreams and I would wake up feeling ashamed and jittery. But if they tried to escape during waking hours, I would push them straight back into the box.

‘That was a long time ago,’ I said to the empty room, my voice weak.

But sitting there in the interview room, punch drunk, weakened and exhausted, I no longer had the strength to hold the box shut. The lid flew open and, like wasps escaping from a bottle, all the memories came flooding out.

After our parents died, when I was sixteen and Tilly fourteen, I went to live with Uncle Pete (my dad’s brother), Aunt Sandra, and their kids in Hastings, a few miles along the coast from our family home. Their daughter, Michelle, was my age, and my other cousin, Dominic, was thirteen. It was just me because Tilly was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which had a specialist department for dealing with people like her: accident victims who had broken their spines. We visited her every weekend, driving up to Aylesbury, the whole journey like a trip on a rollercoaster. Every lurch of the car sent bubbles of panic through my blood. I held my breath every time we passed a truck. It was terrifying and I had to be dragged into the car every time like a dog being dragged into the vet’s. Uncle Pete, a no-nonsense, balding bank manager with the emotional intelligence of a goldfish, was a firm believer in getting back in the saddle, in embracing your fears. After a while though – and, I’m sure, some stern words from Sandra – Pete relented and let us go by train. I could cope with his passive aggressive comments about the extortionate costs and the stale buffet sandwiches far better than I could handle being driven on motorways.

Because Hastings and Eastbourne are only thirty minutes apart, I was originally going to return to my old school to study for my A-levels. But on my first day back I realised I couldn’t handle the pitying looks, the soft voices, the sympathy. At lunch time, I sat on my own, chewing food I couldn’t taste, an invisible force field around my table. A couple of upper sixth form girls came over to talk to me, and if I’d been a different kind of person I could have milked it, let them look after me. They could have passed me around, the sad orphan virgin, and made me merely a sad orphan.