‘What’s stopping you from getting to sleep?’ asked Frances.

‘How do you get to sleep?’

She didn’t answer. I was choked by sobs. ‘Are we allowed to cry? Without pills?’

‘No—you’d better control yourself.’

Then, something strange happened inside me, I wanted to feel her arms around me and it was so sudden, so unexpected, that I was overcome. I threw myself into her arms before I realised what I was doing.

‘Stop!’ she whispered, horrified.

And the whip cracked above my head. I recoiled, terrified. This was the first time it had been aimed at me. I still shudder to think of it. I curled up, panting as if I’d been running.

Running? I had never run!

I knew very well that we weren’t permitted to touch one another and, since I’d never known any different, I took it for granted. The rush of feeling I’d just experienced created confused notions in me: holding hands, walking with arms around each other, holding each other—those words were part of my vocabulary, they described gestures I had never made. A walk? I remembered maybe lawns, or seasons, because those words had a very distant ring, a faint echo that quickly died away. I knew the flaking grey walls, the bars at fifteen-centimetre intervals, the guards pacing regularly up and down around the perimeter of the room.

‘What do they want of us?’ I asked again. She shrugged.

‘All we know is what they don’t want.’

She looked away and it was plain that the conversation was at an end. Anthea was the first woman to talk to me for any length of time, perhaps she would be the only one?

I concentrated on keeping my eyes closed, in the hope that eventually I’d fall asleep. For the first time, I understood that I was living at the very heart of despair. I had insulated myself from it, believing that it was out of bitterness, but suddenly I realised it was out of caution, and that all these women who lived without knowing the meaning of their existence were mad. Whether it was their fault or not, they’d gone mad by force of circumstance, they’d lost their reason because nothing in their lives made sense any more.

I didn’t know how old I was. Since I didn’t have periods and I had virtually no breasts, some of the women thought I wasn’t yet fourteen, barely thirteen, but Anthea, who was more logical than the others, thought that I must be around fifteen or sixteen.

‘We don’t know how long we’ve been here. Looking at your height, you’re no longer a child, and some of us stopped menstruating a long time ago. Anna’s young, she doesn’t have any wrinkles, neither do I, so they say. It isn’t the menopause that has withered us, it’s despair.’

‘So men were very important?’

She nodded.

‘Men mean you are alive, child. What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain.’