There’s Dad, with his hand on the small of my back, pushing me on my bike with no stabilisers. Go, Sammy. He’s clapping me. ‘Great girl, look at you!’ Look at me now, Dad. Maybe if you hadn’t been such a ‘fucking coward’ – Mother’s gentler term of endearment that she’d hit him with as he backed out the door to go away on another one of his trips – I wouldn’t have fallen so far down this stinking rabbit hole, which is lined with shit edging its way higher, climbing into every part of me. Maybe if you had admitted the truth, just once, believed my stories, which I knew you knew were true, instead of dismissing my overactive imagination – ‘It’s never as bad as all that, my little catastrophist’ – maybe we could have tackled this thing together, head on. Well, Dad, look at me now, look at me. It really is as bad as all that. For once in your goddamn life, do something.

I’m whimpering behind the hand, which grips tighter and clamps against my cheekbones so hard they might break. He never listened, he never came to my rescue. He never would. No one would. Something falls away inside, and the hysteria dies, the laughter is swallowed, the King is gone, and I have no fury, no frenzy to shield me.

That wall I built is crashing down, and feelings are invading me, flooding my body, coming up and out through my nose and mouth. The man’s voice curses at me. I’m not even sure what language he’s speaking, but he’s removed his hand and shaking off my snot and tears, and now he’s tying a napkin or something over my face and pulling the knot hard at the back of my head.

Luce, I think you knew I was never in control of myself. I’m not to blame, we are none of us to blame. ‘Can I write a note to someone?’ I say, or I try to say. The man hits me across my gagged mouth and growls ‘Shut up’ as he ties my hands behind my back with thin string.

Of course they won’t get a note to anyone out there. As far as they all know I’m dead already.