There was more than one room in the flat. Perhaps there was a real grown-up in here somewhere.

The woman looked up at the sound of her voice. That was progress. At least she could still hear and understand. She looked at Meggy, glanced away, frowned, looked again.

Meggy took a small step towards her, and the woman did her best to slither into the far corner beneath the bed.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ Meggy said, the words, those adult words, sounding entirely foreign coming from her mouth.

The woman was staring at the open doorway.

‘That man’s not here. He locked me in and left. It’s just us then, is it?’

The woman stared at her then looked down at her own legs. She began to cry. Meggy considered doing the same. Half an hour earlier she’d been standing in the school car park and wondering what was for dinner. Now she was trapped in a mostly dark, unknown place with a woman who’d completely lost control of herself.

‘My name’s Meggy,’ she said. ‘What’s yours?’

The response was louder sobbing.

She bent down and held her hand out to the woman peering from below the pillow. As she reached in, the mess on the floor gave off not just a stench, but palpable warmth. The realisation dawned that the woman had lost control of herself when she’d heard the door open. Presumably she’d thought the man was coming in. The full meaning of that sank in as Meggy stared at the physical and metaphorical pile of shit she’d landed in. If this grown-up couldn’t fight him, couldn’t bear the thought of what he might do to her, then how was Meggy supposed to survive it?

Weapon, she thought again. This is no good. Sitting here is doing no good. I have to find something to fight him with. She looked around. There were five plastic hooks on the wall, each with the same pale pink dress hanging from it, a darker pink ribbon at its waist, tiny white buttons down the front shaped like daisies. Who the hell needed five dresses exactly the same? Meggy wondered.

The light source was a small plastic child’s lamp with a peeled-paint Disney figure at its base. Hitting him over the head with that would be like smashing someone over the head with a paper plate, but she did need it to look around with and that meant unplugging the short lead and finding other power points.

‘I’m going to have a look round and I need the light. Will you be okay if I take it out of here?’

Then the woman met Meggy’s eyes, shaking her head in tiny small jerks at first, then whipping it to and fro, her matted hair flying.

‘No,’ she moaned. ‘No, don’t take the light, don’t, don’t take it.’