The sound of that shrill screaming tore right through me. And I couldn’t find any anger to divert it either. The sound took me straight back to Ivy. And quicker still to Priory Gardens where my mind got stuck. It took me to smashing glass. Shouting. To our childminder’s screams as she scurried upstairs. To the Fireman Sam theme trilling along behind Antony Blackstone as he launched himself at my friends. To that look in his sweaty eyes as he brought his hammer down. To waking up and seeing him hanging up there, swinging back and forth from the wooden eave. To the blood I woke up tasting.

It all started there.

‘She’s still alive! This one, she’s got a pulse. It’s faint but it’s there…’

‘It’s all right, Sweetpea. You’re all right now, nothing can hurt you.’

‘Can’t seem to settle him,’ said the woman in the dressing gown.

I tore back inside the ship like I was a crying toddler myself and the cabin was my dad’s open arms. But I got lost. I must have gone to every deck but they all looked the same. I got so confused I couldn’t even remember my room number. All I wanted to do was collapse onto my bed and scream.

Chest thumping, mouth dry, legs drained, piles stinging, I gave up and sat as gently as I could on a sofa beside the elevators in the Entertainments Quarter. I was opposite a small cinema – The Classics Lounge – open twenty-four hours. I went inside the empty theatre and settled into a seat at the back. It was Kevin Costner films all night long. Waterworld had just started.

I woke up as some wolf was shot dead. Totally different movie.

The sleep did me good. I was at least level enough moodwise to blend into a snaking line of tourists who were headed up to the main restaurant. There’s no such thing as a good time to hit the buffet on a cruise, I learned. There’s always an assortment of besandalled old funts coughing around the pancake station, jostling for the strips of bacon that have actually seen an oven and the corners of French toast that don’t look like they’ve been gang-banged.

There were so many people – I wasn’t more than an arm’s length away from anyone at all times – and yet I’d never felt so alone. Luckily, this feeling of loneliness never lasts long for me because human beings are, basically, cunts. All of them. Eventually. They are. You wait.

I must have walked through at least three farts and saw an old man eating half a grapefruit like it was a vagina. It totally curbed my appetite. I found a table to myself, as out of the way of the throng as I could get, and I watched the families congregating.