‘That was good, wasn’t it, Katie? I think it’s getting better.’

* * *

OLIVIA

Things I remember about Arden

Arden is deep in the countryside, ringed by stagnant fields and petrified trees. I thought when they took me there that I was going to my death. They would have absolute control over me. They proposed to bury me alive behind all those doors. Every ten yards along the corridors, doors and more doors, unlocking, slamming, relocking. When they visit me, Mummy and Kate, I come up to them as if from a well, hauled up, up, door after door. From where they sit they can never see the bottom of it nor understand that this is where I have come from. I don’t want them to see me like this. And I don’t know whether it’s yesterday that I saw them or last month because the days run into each other and never change.

I can’t tell them. Since I’ve been here I learn that what we say here is twisted into nonsense to those outside and whatever words I use make them frown, further convinced of my instability. I don’t try to speak about the way the staff slam and shout, treating even the doors with hatred, how they edge round the room, their backs to the walls of the ward which are the colour of dead skin, their eyes never leaving us. They are afraid of us. In my opinion they are very odd.

We have reason after all, for being here: that’s what I know. Bridget has reason; she’s perhaps sixty, gave birth to a dead baby all those years ago. Agnes won’t eat the food. She feeds only from the pig bin outside the kitchen. She is heavy and slow like a cow. She lived among cows because she is a farmer’s wife. I don’t know why she thinks real food is too good for her, but she does have a reason, I know. So many of the others sit and stare, or if they talk I can’t make it out; it comes in odd waves and jerks like a jumper unravelling. But I hold this tightly in my head: no one’s here without a reason. I know that. The staff, however, choose to be here. What sort of reason is that?

Other things I never tell them

How it feels to wear a shroud of canvas, layers thick, stitched across and re-stitched, and to sleep in sheets of layered and cross-sewn calico, made so strong to stop us hurting ourselves with them. It chafes my skin red. Our ward is twenty strong. Like animals we rise with the light and are in bed at four-thirty, laid out under the high, blistered ceiling, our beds crammed in only a few inches apart. We breathe each other’s sour air, smell all of each other’s most intimate smells. I sleep between Gladys, a skeleton who wears the sweat perfume of death, and Mary who soils her bed and flies somewhere every night with massive wings and a chatter in her throat. I have never known this class of women before. They don’t worry about such distinctions, each wrapped in her own cocoon. It’s only the nurses who can’t hear my voice and learn about my family without goading me. ‘Posh cow.’ ‘Your Highness.’ ‘Lady Muck.’