I was sad. I’d always hated my cellmates because of their indifference to me and I’d never spared a thought for them. On our arrival here, they’d been overwhelmed by their fear and despair, and I’d remained isolated, a terrified little girl surrounded by weeping women. In dying, they’d be abandoning me once more. Anger welled up inside me. So they had thought about our situation, they’d been wondering about it for a long time, and they’d always excluded me from their discussions. Anthea was the first to take the trouble to talk to me. I’d found our conversation interesting and had been determined to listen to her, to think, and forget that for years she’d ignored me just as the others had.

‘Why are you talking to me today?’

She looked taken aback.

‘But you’re the one who came to speak to me,’ she said. ‘You’re always on your own, as if you don’t want to join in with us.’

I was about to tell her that they always stopped talking when I drew near, but suddenly I felt terribly tired. Perhaps I was unused to conversing at such length. She saw me yawn.

‘They’ll be turning the lights down soon. Let’s get ready for bed. We’ll speak more tomorrow.’

Of course I was unable to sleep. I wanted to carry on with the story that Annabel had interrupted at the point when I was in a cell waiting for the young guard to appear, but I couldn’t concentrate. Usually, when I told myself a story, I became completely impervious to what was going on around me, but that evening, the comings and goings of the women arranging mattresses, whispering and the gradual descent of silence all disrupted my train of thought. I reflected on the years, the grief, those lost husbands, the children they’d never seen again, and wondered about my own mother, since I must have had a mother. I couldn’t remember her. I only knew that there must have been someone I called mummy, and who wasn’t in the prison. Was she dead? I went over the little I’d heard about the disaster, which boiled down to a few words: screams, the scramble, night and a growing terror. They thought they must have fainted, perhaps several times, and that everything had happened very quickly. On reflection I concluded that this explanation was not enough. There were forty of us who had nothing in common, whereas before each woman had had a family, parents, brothers, sisters, friends: only a meticulous selection could have only brought together strangers. This was confirmed by Anthea the next day.

‘Just think what a huge job that must have been: they made sure that none of us knew any of the others. They took us from all four corners of the country, and even from several countries, checking that fate had not thrown together two cousins or friends separated by circumstances.’

‘Why? What are they looking for?’

‘We nearly drove ourselves mad asking that same question. You were too young, you couldn’t understand, and you’d curl up into a ball on the ground, you wouldn’t answer when we spoke to you.’