When we wake, we wash again, we eat some more, we watch shite TV, we read the two shite books, and – we wait. There’s no sign of the younger sister, but the elder is wheeled out, all made up, shaky and stoned. I can’t believe Irina is making her do this, but then Irina follows orders from on high. Are they giving the younger one a break, or is she so broken she’ll never be good to go again? I’m sure the doc with his bag of tricks will patch her up – she’s worth too much not to be worked.

The night comes, and with it another party – this one very young. A twenty-first. This is bad: snooker cues and cigarettes, but it happens at a distance, we survive, we eat, we wash, we sleep, we watch crap TV, read our recycled books and we don’t talk about any of it, and then another night and then another and still no sign of the money, and no sign of the sister. It’s better to forget her face, which floats insistently before me, and is accompanied by such a slam of guilt that I am permanently breathless. We watched and let it happen, thankful it wasn’t us.

Irina is avoiding me now, having said that payment would be next week, then next month. I guess that’s how it works in the real world: monthly paycheques. Since the night of the injection and that particular woozy, I’m not able to hold on to any thought for longer than a few seconds, if even that. There’s no thinking in straight lines. Everything jumbles and whirls, fast and confused. Where did both those men materialise from? Haven’t seen them since but they’re there somewhere, hiding in the walls, the curtains, the fixtures. Their faces accompany me on every outing, and I do what I’m told, their voices echoing in my ear, the aftershock of the sting of the needle vivid and sore.

The nights stretch, ten, twelve, twenty of them, not a moment off. Time is a shape-shifter, a trickster. It stretches forwards and folds back on itself like an accordion. It’s out of tune, out of sync, and there’s nothing distinct from the sensation of it passing. I want to scream at it to slow down, to stop, to give us a break, but it pushes on. I feel I’m being played.