The other girls pretend to be cats, lions, hyenas, clowns; they are telling each other their feelings.

‘Listen and imagine,’ the woman continues. ‘Let’s all lie on our backs and close our eyes, and relax and imagine we are mermaids.’ She makes a silly whooshing sound and pretends to splash an imaginary tail about. I try to imagine Sammy here.

‘How are you, Nicoleta?’ she asks me. ‘Don’t feel like playing today?’

I stay standing and face the wall, which is buttercup-yellow and covered with posters of painted handprints. We are not children.

‘That’s ok, dear. Do as much or as little as you feel you want to.’

How does she know my name? No one has called me my full name, except Papa one time when he came home from the pub in one of his plum-cheeked moods.

The other girls are lying on their backs and some of them are giggling. I wonder how they can lie down so easily. The women here keep trying to make me ‘draw my feelings’, or ‘write it down, in my own language, for my eyes only’. They want me to play, to learn to trust again, a little at a time. I think they are stupid, these women with their dyed hair and soft voices. I think that would be a very dangerous thing for me to do. I think back to Papa telling me ‘I have made sure he is a good man,’ and see Petre frothing at the mouth.

‘This is a safe place,’ says the woman with very blonde hair. It must come from a bottle because no sunshine strong enough to bleach the landscape or brown the skin or lighten the hair ever gets through the clouds here. She’s wearing too much make-up and a permanent smile. I don’t think they are real, these women. Are they looking to be attractive to men? I don’t see any rings on their fingers, and it’s weird that they would want to put mascara on their eyes or lipstick on their lips for us. Irina wore too much powder on her face, which caught in the lines around her mouth. I see her in our room, spraying us in perfume, sliding our masks on our faces, making sure we were ‘battle ready’, as Sammy would say.

‘Hello, Nicoleta, are you there?’ the blonde woman says. Of course I’m here, where else would I be? ‘You seem to be very far away. Would you like to tell us what you are thinking?’

I look around the room and see that the girls are all sitting in a circle, on cushions on the floor, staring at me. I shake my head at them.

‘Would you like to sit down and join the circle?’