There’s a cage for her head. That is good, her head needs a cage. She lies on the tray as she’s told. They will slide her in and cook her, she will come out done, they will slide her into the cooling rack at the morgue.

Once I caught a fish alive.

The machine swallows her and the noise begins. So loud, so monstrously loud, that her throat is surprised into silence. It is so very sore. She doesn’t have to sing any more. There is nothing, nothing outside the noise. She closes her eyes. It begins.

What? The unravelling. The tugging of threads. Memories like rolls of film pulled out of her head yard by yard, unspooled into the light and dissolved in its brightness. Jigging on Grandma’s knee. Sundress with a daisy wish spot. Musical teddy, toddled into the sea and rusted silent. Green and white gingham. Pushed over by the boy. Handstands on the wall, six of them, giggles, show-your-knickers. A slap. Nothing forgotten. All remembered and retrieved… but neutralized.

A wall of sadness hovers, threatens to break over her head like a giant wave. But it breaks instead on a television in the dim back room of an unknown kid in a faraway country. Countless moments of squashed-down emotion, lumps in the throat, crumble to the clean white sand of a tropical beach and a long, cool drink. Humiliation in a music lesson: erased, sheet music wiped of its crotchety spikes, now filling only with the pleasure of Allegro in G. First week at secondary school, too scared to get past the No of the dinner lady, wetting herself in afternoon assembly: undone. The two boys behind who spotted the wet patch, smelt wee, and for five years called her… whatever it was, it’s already gone.

Then the school she transferred to for sixth form: corridors thick with privilege. Impenetrable friendships: groups and gaggles. No lab partner. Swapped to the sticky locker. They are in gangs or pairs and she’s alone, but under a hundred eyes. Even as they rise, the memories fall like a sift of flour, blow into clouds that evaporate into the perfect blue of an azure, time-lapsed sky.