The boy is sitting waiting, and we set off immediately to pick up the sisters, who are in a similar house in an almost identical street a few minutes’ drive away. As we wait outside, my mind curves inside the house, and it sees the sisters and many men having a party, where the girls are the prize. I try to pull my thoughts back inside this car and focus on the driver’s head, which is small and shaven, his neck swimming in his shirt, scrawny like a chicken. I think of the fat man’s neck and feel a tickle in my throat that might be the beginning of a laugh. Perhaps I have caught Sammy’s habit of making a joke of everything.

Ling is exhaling on the window and draws on the condensation with her fingertip. ‘What are you drawing?’ I ask her.

‘My boyfriend name,’ she says, as she adds a heart. ‘He will come find me.’

I can smell Papa’s cigarette smoke in the car.

The sisters eventually climb back into the car and I feel as if my heart might burst from seeing their blank eyes, which are permanently fixed on some point as far away from the here and now as possible. Their pain is palpable – it beats in the air like injured birds, trapped.

I try to make them see my words hanging in the air. ‘You don’t deserve what these people do to you, what I did to you … you don’t deserve any of it.’ I summon the Madonna to come to them and offer some comfort. My own body is beating to a familiar tune, everything rushing and racing and needing release. The need to run is making me shake in the deepest part of me.

As soon as we arrive back to the house and the car door is opened, I sprint. There is no stopping my body. The boy shouts after me, filthy curses. A man comes out of one of the other houses and chases me, his face purple with exertion and rage when I glance back. Maybe Luca was not pretending after all, maybe I am as fast as a bullet. At the end of the road there is a high wall, too high to climb. The man reaches out to grab my arm and misses. I hear a noise coming out of me that is like the ghost sounds of a chicken squawking after its head has been cut loose from its body.

At the top of the road the three girls are all staring at me, Ling shouting at me to come back, come back. There’s nowhere else to go. We’re caught in a road that only goes one way and then loops back on itself. Irina comes to the doorway and watches silently.

The man is shouting, ‘Stop, you stupid bitch, there is nowhere to run.’