I get a stool and push it under the kitchen window and climb up, opening the window as far as it’ll go, which isn’t very far at all, as it turns out, like every other feckin’ window in the place. I ram my elbow against the glass, again and again, heat and energy propelling me on as the others stand staring like mute, dumb animals.

‘Help me, throw something, come on let’s go, now, now, come on, Miss Romania.’ The glass is impervious to the battering. Nico doesn’t move, she seems paralysed, entranced by her own shitty behaviour. I bash my whole body against the glass, a battering ram, until suddenly I stop, aware that someone else has walked into the kitchen and is watching me. A dark, male presence.

Hands pull me down, a voice pours into my ear, stabbing and insistent, jerking around in strange halting English. He grabs the top of my arm, which is covered in bruises, and it’s like a metal clamp. None of the girls move. Another man enters and two sets of hands encircle me, and I’m being lifted, carried the length of the hall, into a room where the curtains are drawn. The two men place me on a table, one holding my legs, the other my arms. ‘Shhhhh, good girl.’

I’ve never felt such rage – like one of those cartoon characters that have smoke pouring out their ears.

I hear mumbling, and snippets of: ‘… good girl … over soon …’ The pricks prick me. There’s no fighting with this woozy; it’s too strong. All the angry eruptions I’ve ever heard in my life, and some I’ve never heard before, pour out of me. I cover you with my curses: I curse you and yours and your unborn babies, I curse the eyes you see with, the tongue you speak with, the skin that encases your body, the bones that hold you up. I curse you with a painful, slow, cancerous death.

*

When I wake I’m in the pink bedroom and Nico is at the bedside table in front of the mirror, being daubed and lacquered. She’s wearing a teeny twin-set of leather skirt and cropped top. Irina is applying touches of gloss, the final sweep of powder. If I could make that woman wither and die by my stare I would, but then I think of the looks Luce visited on Mother over the years and know that no good will come of them. I mean if Luce never managed it … It’s not Irina’s fault anyway. We’re just tiny pieces in a devil’s chess game. There goes his big hairy hand descending from the sky, lifting Irina’s tiny hand to apply the powder to the dewy skin of a girl-pawn, in this single-sided game of moves and counter-moves.