He pushes the chair back so it squeaks on the ground. ‘It might be better if you tell her yourself,’ he says. Rude little mouse. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. We can talk more then. Try to rest up.’

I hear the door close, and voices mumbling in the corridor.

The nurse glides back in. He places a tray with the vanilla ice cream and luminous pink jelly on my knees and perches himself on the side of the bed. I let him lift the spoon to my mouth and the cold softness slides down.

There’s a timid rap on the door and I hear Luce’s voice. ‘Sammy, it’s me, Luce.’

She walks in with a massive bunch of purple-dyed tulips and Mrs O’D by her side. What’s this? Some kind of intervention or something? Didn’t that psych listen to a word I said? I want to fling the wibbly-wobbly fucking jelly against the wall and see if it sticks, and watch it slide down.

The nurse says, ‘Ten minutes. She’s very tired,’ before he leaves.

Mrs O’D comes to the side of the bed and looks at me in a different way than she normally does, as if this time she’s really seeing me, not just a projection of the me she carries: a lying nympho. ‘Sorry for being rude to you the other day,’ she says. This is hard for her. I think of my own mother and try to imagine those same words coming out of her dried-up, smoker’s-lined slit of a mouth.

‘Thanks,’ I manage.

‘I’ll leave you two here to have a good chat,’ she says. ‘I’ll be in the waiting room.’

Luce sits at the side of the bed. ‘What happened?’

Something about the way she’s looking at me, so full of pity and love and some other condescending I’m-so-concerned-about-you look makes me want to kick her off the bed.

She places her hand on my forehead. ‘You’re clammy,’ she says.

It’s her hand that is clammy. I move my head away so my cheek is pressed into the pillow and I present her with only one eye, a demented cyclops.

‘Have your parents been in?’

I grunt.

She gets up, all angry and righteous, and starts pacing up and down by the bed. ‘I heard Mum and Dad speak about it last night when they thought I was asleep. They said you were obviously very troubled, and perhaps things were not so good at home, but that your parents are your legal guardians and there’s nothing anyone can do about this unless there is factual evidence of abuse …’