JUDGE: Do you want to explain what happened in the garden?

ALICE: I – [Stops] It was a difficult time for me.

Sebastian’s skin had smelt of aftershave; his mouth had tasted of coffee.

JUDGE: The video that was uploaded shows him kissing you.

ALICE: [Clears throat] Yes.

JUDGE: Were his advances unsolicited?

ALICE: Of course! I had morning sickness. When he kissed me I was in the middle of explaining to him what I had come up to the islands to discuss with Eva – but hadn’t yet because she had been so busy – all the research I’d been doing on the late-medieval iteration of the islands of women. I’d read the whole of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and other romance texts, such as Silence, about a girl who is brought up as a boy in order not to be disinherited. Malory’s story is ostensibly set in Arthur’s court, but interspersed throughout are tantalising mentions of a parallel island kingdom, run by women – the Lady of the Lake, whose name is Nyneve, and Arthur’s magician sister, Morgan the fairy, and the Queen of the Wasteland. They are the ones who take Arthur away on the boat at the end, when he is dying. Anyway, then he kissed me, and I was immediately sick into the flower bed. It’s horrible in the moment, and afterwards you feel better, normally. But not on this occasion. The women took me over to the island, to Cwen. For a ritual.

JUDGE: Can you describe the ritual?