‘You won’t get away with this,’ she says again to the driver, as I pull her away. I can feel the heat coming off her just by standing beside her; her whole body is radiating and vibrating.

As we walk down the hall, I say to her, ‘You must calm.’

‘One of them looked about eleven.’

‘We must be calm if we to get out of here alive.’ I push the bedroom door open and we go inside.

She breathes in deeply and as she exhales her body goes limp. ‘You’re right, Roomie, I have a terrible temper on me. Terrible. Once it takes hold, I’m not in charge.’

I understand her emotions have taken her over. I do not think this girl has ever learned anything about how to protect herself. I tell her, ‘Mama teached me to hide my feelings … I was scared of Sergiu and Victor, and she said if they saw it they eat my fear. They hurt Luca because he could not put it away.’

‘My mother used to feed on my fear.’

She looks like a five-year-old as she says this, biting down hard on her lip.

There’s a tune in Sammy’s head, which she speaks aloud: Shit, fuck everything …

As I look at her, saying these raging words, with her eyes closed, I wonder how she allows the men do the things they do to her at night; how she does not lose her temper then. I know the answer even as I ask the question – she can only get worked up over other people’s pain.

We hear the girls’ light footsteps traipse upstairs.

‘So,’ she says, ‘maximum capacity.’

We listen to the creaking floorboards and then the silence. These girls: they come and they go, and no one is stopping them, someone is selling them, their parents, siblings, aunties, uncles, grandparents, boyfriends, friends. What happens to these girls – us – when they are used up?

I touch my forehead, breastbone, shoulder to shoulder, and then place my hand at the base of my neck. ‘We must eat something,’ I say, thinking of the pills we have swallowed and Mama’s insistence on food being the antidote to any kind of ill. Sammy nods, like she’s in a trance.

The driver is standing at the main door when we go back into the hall. He is a goat-man, with his hoofs and his saliva, which lands in a puddle at our feet. As he leaves he slams the door so hard on its hinges the house rattles. I touch Sammy on the shoulder, and whisper ‘breathe’ into her ear, and her ribcage rises and falls, fast and shallow like a kitten’s.