Watch? There were forty of us living in that big underground room where no one could hide from the others. At five-metre intervals, columns supported the vaulted ceiling and bars separated our living area from the walls, leaving a wide passage all around for the guards’ relentless pacing up and down. No one ever escaped scrutiny and we were used to answering the call of nature in front of one another. At first—so they told me, my memories didn’t go back that far—the women were most put out, they thought of forming a human wall to screen the woman relieving herself, but the guards prohibited it, because no woman was to be shielded from view. When I went to pass water, I found it perfectly natural to go and sit on the toilet seat and carry on my conversation—on the few occasions when I was engaged in conversation. The old women cursed furiously, complaining about the indignity of being reduced to the status of animals. If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought. I never argued with the women, in fact I already found them stupid, but I hadn’t formulated it so clearly.

When I think back on it now, what a horrid little prig I was! I prided myself and revelled in having found a distraction that I thought was extraordinary. I felt as if I was being hounded by a mob, whereas we were all equally helpless prisoners. Isolated due to my young age and the constraints imposed on us, perhaps like the others I needed to create an illusion to enable me to cope with the misery. I have no idea. Now that I’m no longer able to go off hiking, I reflect a great deal, but, with no one to talk to, my thoughts soon start going round in circles. That’s why it is interesting to write them down: I recognise them when they recur and I don’t repeat them.

When Dorothy woke up and found the strength to relate our conversation to the others, she didn’t tell them I’d called her a fool. But despite her efforts not to tarnish her image, she’d learned nothing of my secret and was unable to conceal the fact.

‘A secret! A secret! What right does she have to keep a secret in a situation like this?’

Anthea, who was the brightest of the women, immediately grasped that it wasn’t the actual content of the secret that mattered, but the fact that while living under the continual scrutiny of the other women, it was possible to claim to have a secret and be believed. This seemed too complicated for the women to understand and they dismissed Anthea with a gesture of annoyance, demanding that the secret be prised from me.

‘We must force her. Make her tell us.’

‘How will you do that?’

Carol, the stupidest and the most excitable, parked herself in front of me and in a threatening tone commanded me to speak.