Her father greeted her with a hug as she stepped out of the cab in front of the hospital and promised earnestly to break down the door of the scanning room if she did not emerge within one minute of the scheduled half hour slot. He promised the same thing every year. She loved him for this. In chambers, she had not told anybody about her claustrophobia (despite a number of humiliating episodes which she had explained away as a stomach bug, a hangover, a result of skipping lunch), but her family knew all about it. More specifically, they knew that she had it, and what it entailed for her; they didn’t know its cause. Even Sarah couldn’t be certain – perhaps it had always been there, sleeping, dormant, waiting for the trigger. Perhaps she couldn’t blame one incident, one person. Then again, she remembered in vivid detail the first time she felt this way – drenched in the wet smell of chlorine, and the coolness of slatted wood.

Veronica went first. “I dare you,” she said slowly as she picked at peeling nail varnish. “I dare you to be my slave for ten minutes.”

“No. That’s not one dare, that’s as many dares as you can fit into ten minutes.” Sarah had procured a Cherry Coke from the pool house fridge and rested her bottom lip against the cold glass, blowing gently to make music.

Veronica laughed. “No, I won’t ask you to do anything stupid. Just things like, well like being a servant in olden times. But you’re only allowed to answer ‘Yes’ to me, and you have to do whatever I say.”

Sarah furrowed her brow, placing the glass bottle on the floor next to the slatted wood of the bunk. She crossed her legs around themselves. Loud thumping occupied her chest and her stomach clenched. Servitude? It was degrading and both she and Veronica knew this, seeing it exactly for what it was – an absolute concession of power, a hundred miles away from the self-respect that Sarah’s parents had always instilled in her. ‘Be true to yourself’. ‘Stand up for what’s right’. ‘Be the leader’. These were practically family mantras – the imperative to be the shepherd and not the sheep, to be aware of the choices one made, to not blindly do as one’s told. They talked about such things over the dinner table. Sometimes in relation to trivial issues, like not succumbing to fads; other times, in recollection of the Holocaust, and family members lost there. Even as a young child, Sarah had absorbed her parents’ outsider mindset, their integrity too, and by twelve, this had evolved into a tangential fixation: a need to always be in control – of the moral code, of the situation, of herself. But, there was something enticing about the opposite: the challenge of letting go. There was something freeing about it. “Fine,” she agreed, as though it was nothing. “What shall I do for you, Queen Veronica?”