I don’t know how many days I had been locked in the caravan when I crawled the length of it one morning and under the sink found two tins of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup from years ago, probably – from the days of the brasser I would say. I opened them and I drank them cold and if I did not come to life exactly it felt as if my thoughts came for a short while in a clearer, more realistic way. Then I went to the closet to throw up.

I hated to use the chemical toilet in there because of the smell but I had no choice – my gut heaved and emptied itself. I wrapped myself around the tiny plastic loo, tears streaming. I saw then that the spillage over the years had worked away at the floorboards beneath. They were rotten to the extent that some had been replaced with a piece of ply.

I waited until the night. Elsie and Suze had come out just once in the afternoon to whisper their filth at me, and Evan had on the roof for a while made his tap-tappings and I believed he was working at some kind of spell – something from an Aleister Crowley book, maybe; magick – and when he went away I waited, waited, until all in the farmhouse was darkness and quiet, and there was just the feeling of the dogs outside.

I unhooked the chemical loo and lifted it clear and the ply beneath came loose so easily it was unreal, it was like wet cardboard in my hands. The hole I quickly made was no more than two, two and a half foot wide but that was enough to squeeze through, and I scraped past an axle, and I was crawling along the wet ground of the yard then beneath the caravan. All of the dogs huddled close to the ground and peered at me, oh and their eyes – so yellow – were livid, but they made not a sound, they were quiet as the air was cold.

I wriggled out from beneath the caravan and sat with my back to it to ease the beating of my heart. No lights came on in the farmhouse and the dogs in perfect silence watched me as I found the strength to walk to the Fiesta and climbed into it. I lifted off the panel for the wires to come loose and I knew well enough which wires to rub together.