‘There is a choice! I totally agree!’ Dr. R says, perking up, raising a righteous finger. I’m surprised by her vehemence. She puts down the notepad altogether – she never managed to turn it the right way up – and stretches her legs. She stands up in that leisurely way she has and starts strolling around the room with some inner purpose that’s lost on me. But I like watching her in this new dark attire with those skull studs in her ears. Then as she passes me, I catch a whiff of her: she’s been drinking again. It’s only the middle of the day but I’m pretty sure she’s been drinking.

‘Tell me about Milton House,’ she says, leaning against the windowsill, raising one eyebrow.

‘Nothing to tell. Do you know it?’ I ask.

‘No. I knew someone who worked there once.’ Again, this is unlike her; she never proffers personal information.

‘Why did they move me here?’ I ask.

She stares at me for a long moment and then says, ‘Milton House, Connie . . .’

‘I don’t really remember it.’

‘You were there for six weeks, you must remember it.’

‘What do you want to know?’

She folds her arms. ‘I want to know everything. But in particular I want you to tell me about the night you escaped.’

‘I don’t remember that,’ I say.

‘Well, try.’

I’ve said it before but she should really watch that school ma’am side; she does herself no favours. Si Hubby has probably had quite enough of that; I bet the twenty-three-year-old doesn’t give him that attitude. I bet she thinks the sun shines out of his proverbial. We all thrive on adoration.

‘I don’t remember much. They had me drugged up to the eyeballs.’

That’s not completely true; I do remember snippets of it: arriving there and a leery man in a white coat telling me he had to keep the door open so that he could come in and look at me – he was a perv who liked watching me get undressed; queuing up for drugs like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; being watched swallowing pills; being jabbed in the arse if I refused; being in this hypersensitive state most of the time and therefore like a magnet for the insane – I felt like the Pied Piper of Mentalists; the colour of the doors – a sickly green; the lights in the corridor that came on when you stepped on the lino and went off behind you, giving the peculiar sensation of being both in control and paranoid at the same time; knowing that I was in a forgotten place, that I’d slipped through the net to somewhere deep and dark where no one was looking out for me; and other stranger things that don’t need remembering.

‘How did you feel in there?’

Ha. ‘I didn’t feel. That was the point.’