Another hour. The loud music is still banging against the insides of the car, the smoke is still wafting. I look at Magda, who has her eyes closed. Her lips are moving.

The car eventually comes to a stop in a deserted place. It’s dark outside. I get out, the ground spinning sickly beneath my feet, and I hold my stomach as everything inside me comes up. I can feel pee trickling down the inside of my leg. Magda is holding my hair off my face and rubbing my back. Igor waves a hand in front of his nose and then pinches his nostrils. ‘What’s wrong with her? Is there something you’re not telling us. Is she with child?’ Am I? Could Petre have put a baby in me when I was not looking? What if it’s a girl?

‘She just needs some water and air. We need a break,’ Magda says.

Igor speaks to the man, who shrugs. I look around me and can make out a dark field with low hedges and silhouettes of tall shedding trees, their branches beckoning. I want to run to one of them and put my arms around its girth, feel its solidity, hear it whispering to me. I want to press my body to its old leathery skin and climb. The headlights of a van sweep over us before it pulls up beside us, and two men and more girls get out.

‘I want to speak to Petre,’ Magda says to Igor. ‘He’ll kill you when he finds out what you have done.’

Igor comes close to her, sticks his face in hers, their noses touching, and says, ‘If Petre gave a damn, he would be here with you now. I don’t think he cares for old mutton any more.’

Magda makes a sound like Mama made when Papa told her I was going to go away to England, for an education.

‘Now shut up, woman, and get in.’

There are seven girls and three of them have the blackest skin I have ever seen, like a dark winter’s night without a moon. A ghost passes through my body and I have to pinch myself hard. They’re making noises like they’re talking gibberish and one of them is banging her hands against the pane of glass. I think the men might stop and hit her, but they only laugh and turn the music up louder. I wish the gibbering girls would be quiet; I wish the men would tell them to shut up. I want to scream at them to shut up.