When I said this he pulled me back by my hair so I was about half a metre away from the mirror. I could see myself clearly. My face was red from where he’d dragged my hair back and my eyes were swollen from crying.

‘Now listen to me,’ he said, pressing his mouth to my ear. ‘I put this mirror in here so you could have a good look at yourself, ask why you succumbed to temptation, why you let the enemy get inside your head. Does that look like a good soldier, eh?’

He jabbed his finger at the side of my head as he said this.

‘Well, does it?’

I shook my head.

‘No,’ he said, letting go of my hair. ‘No, it doesn’t. Now I want you to sit there and take a long, long look at yourself and see if you can see the mark of the enemy on you.’

He gave me a shove and I slumped to the ground. Then he came up behind me and pulled me to my feet. He said that what he was doing was fair, and that any good soldier needs to take their punishment graciously. I had no idea what he was on about but then I saw he had a line of rope wrapped round his arm. He slowly unloosened it and then, grabbing both my hands, he tied the rope round them tightly. I asked him why he was tying me up, said that I wasn’t going anywhere, but he just ignored me. The mirror was directly in front of me, and as I twisted my arms and begged for release Sarge kept telling me to look at that mirror, to see if I could find the good soldier.

All the while I cried out, begged him to stop. I had no idea why he was doing it. What had I done wrong? He’d never been like this before. Even when I’d played up as a kid, the worst I’d got was a slap round the ear, never this. Never this.

After a while my arms started to go numb and this scared me. I begged him to untie the rope but he just ignored me and walked to the other side of the room. After a few minutes he started talking but he didn’t sound like Sarge. His voice had changed. It was like some demon had got inside him.

He told me that the world as I knew it had changed. Out there, out in the village and beyond, across the country, everything had gone to dust. It was just him and me. We were the only ones left.

What he said seemed to come in and out, like waves, his voice loud then soft, muffled then clear, so I just caught certain words. Twenty-four hours. All gone. Despots. Time of reckoning. Illegal war. He said that bit over and over. Though I didn’t know which war he was talking about: the war in the desert or a new war, one that had just begun out there, that had turned everything to dust. It certainly sounded illegal. But then he said other things. Sweeping it clean. ‘I’m sweeping it clean’, that was it. Then he said her name. Isobel. Said she’d gone too. And her criminal dad. I wanted to know where she’d gone but I didn’t dare ask. Then he started talking about religion and he got all agitated. ‘Death to the zealots,’ he cried. ‘Death to the lot of them.’