‘The other nurse cried even more after that. I never saw her with dry eyes. She was nice, though. Nice but scared. Janey. Yeah, she was definitely Janey. We talked a lot. She wouldn’t look at me, though. That only made her cry worse. Not that she could see much of me. I was all over bandages, to tell you the truth. She’d talk about any kind of stuff. Her family, things she’d watched on the TV – she liked soaps – holidays she’d been on, her boyfriend, who was dead. And then one of the girls died. I’d never met her. And the doctor accused Janey of doing it and they had this, like, massive row, right in my room. Janey freaked out. Started climbing the walls and then she scratched the doctor’s face, and he held her down and injected her with something. She went still and he dragged her out by her hair and I never saw her again.

‘So now it’s just me and Dr Chris, the other boy and two girls. And I didn’t want to stay in that bed forever, waiting for bad things to happen to me. Of all the parts of me that the grown-ups had bitten and chewed, my legs were probably the least damaged. They hardly touched them. So, as soon as I could, I got out of bed and started trying to walk, hobbling round my little room. That’s when I got a shock, though. My legs weren’t too bad, but my arse hurt like you wouldn’t believe where one of the grown-ups had taken a chunk out of it. I made myself keep walking, though, and Chris let me leave my room.

‘I got to know the girls a bit. One had some kind of stomach infection, a split in her gut or something. She wasn’t much older than you. The other one, Abby, had a badly broken arm. I only met the boy twice. Tommy, his name was. He didn’t seem to be injured; he just sat in a chair all day, rocking backwards and forwards, humming to himself. I don’t know if he was ill or he’d just wigged out. Chris wouldn’t talk about him. I think maybe he might have had something wrong with his brain, you know, like a tumour or something.

‘As I say, there was only the two times I saw him. After that first time the doc put him back in his room and said we weren’t to disturb him.