‘I would have thought one of the newspapers even, but no, they liked the sex-scandal aspect, but didn’t want to actually take sides against the establishment at the end of the day. Better one dirty copper than bring the whole fucking system crumbling down, eh. And it stays with you, doesn’t it? This violation? I mean, I’ve got to respect the way you chose to deal with it. I don’t think that every woman should have to confront their rapist and go through it all again. Me, for me that was the only way, right enough.’

In her very early twenties, when Xanthe ran away for the first time, a succession of dreadlocked men-children had queued up to tell her of the failings of her upbringing, of her bourgeois programming, of her privilege; had tried to dismantle it by dismantling her. The cure they had all recommended, funnily enough, had been a good hard dose of proletarian cock. Xanthe had fucked them and blamed herself, her moneyed-bitch former self, each time the sex got too rough, the language accusatory. She began blunting her accent, her clarion foghorn accent, with a glottal stop, allowing only that her parents were ‘Greek immigrants’ if anyone asked. Mark Carr, Michael Carrington, whatever his name was, had been different. The more she read about him as the coverage of the case reached fever-pitch, she realized that difference was actually a similarity, one they’d both been trying to hide in the squat. He had nothing to take out on her body; he recognized her because they shared that world. He wasn’t a gentle fuck, but he’d been wonderfully disinterested, as though the whole thing had been an academic exercise. She supposed it was, really.

Talking to Clio, now, she just said, ‘I think about it differently, but privately. It’s not something I want to go into. I worked through it all a long time ago, and it’s gone.’

‘Gone. This is it. This is why I’m here. Teach me how you do it, Xanthe. Teach me to stop feeling. I wake up every day with his betrayal, with the idea that the state sanctioned my rape, intruded upon everything I thought I knew.’

Rape, rape, Xanthe thought. You fucked a few times, because he was the most beautiful boy in there and you wanted him, and then felt hideously guilty about the girlfriend you were supposedly so close to. Although maybe Mark had been different with Clio and with Fran – maybe there hadn’t been that recognition, maybe it had been a contemptuous thing. It is not feminist, she warned herself, to mock another woman’s experience as she speaks it.

She really wanted a cigarette.