Her skin hurts like the ripples at the start of skin peeling from flesh and frame. She puts palms to ribcage and feels upward to where her heart is, then down and across to the place where her lungs lie, side by side. Feels where her stomach sits, and around the circumference of the ribcage to the lower back, where her kidneys are. These organs that have grown with her and served her so well, they are all still there. And yet, she thinks she can feel each one of them cower in pain, the bruised edges and centre of each, trying to recover from the moment that someone has been inside her and jostled, in search of what they want.

She needs to be dressed and gone but on crawling into the bedroom she can’t see her own clothes, just a heap of parental clothes, spilling out of the walk-in wardrobe – the stiff-collared blue office shirts of Dad, the pencil skirts and tulle-frilled tops of Mum, all pulled off the rails, trampled and mangled between wood and wire hangers.

Becky is crying quietly, vision blurred, when she finally locates her jeans, folded neatly beside the bed, her shoes placed next to them, as if she’d just taken a swim in a beautiful lake. Was this some kind of parting gesture intended to make the aftermath easier? She pulls on the jeans – far too tight and close now for a frame that is so bruised and sore. She steals a soft plain jumper from a shelf and puts it on.

She isn’t crying now. She isn’t hysterical. She feels unsteady and ill, but her actions are precise. She needs to go.

She creeps downstairs.

There are people asleep on the living-room floor: a mess of bodies lying piled and entwined, heavy and asleep. Music plays at a low volume. All the shutters are closed. She sees nobody who is awake.

She opens the front door and steps out. It is very early morning. She notes this, another fact that lies outside of her.

As she walks the streets back home that morning she feels the edges of herself blur. She needs to find an anchor before she disappears entirely, needs to know whether she has lost something or whether she has been stolen from.

One is carelessness, and one is a crime.

One she blames herself for and one she can blame another for.

For all she knows it is not a crime. For all she knows she is the one who said, Yes, take me, fucking take my body.

But she doesn’t know for sure.

And she is sick, again and again. Where? She does not remember. She does not care.

If she goes to the police they will look at her face and beads and her spaghetti-strap top first, and listen to her voice second.