It sent me right back to childhood, to fond memories of bedwetting. It struck me then how much I have missed all those things you have to give up as a child: tantrums and bodily laxness, to name but a few. Perhaps it was time to reclaim them. The wonderful thing about losing everything, about having nothing left to dread, is that once your fear and reality have merged, there is only liberation; once that wardrobe of convention has been taken off your back, the relief is momentous. However, it was then that the Squeak had walked into the room to find two apparently unconnected events taking place: urine dripping from my chair and Mental Sita with her pants down. Mental Sita is truly mental; the Squeak barely gave her a glance. Me, she isn’t so convinced about. She thinks I’m a fake. The others are nervous around me. They think I am a danger, that I am something to be monitored. Except possibly the policeman who arrested me. I heard him talking to a colleague while I was put in the cell. He could always tell them apart, he said. The guilty ones, relieved at last of the burden of their own crimes, settle down and sleep like babies.

I didn’t sleep a wink.

The Squeak hands me the last of my pills. It really is agony to swallow them.

‘My mother will be very worried about me. Is someone going to bring her to visit?’

She closes her paper and folds it up. ‘I don’t know anything about your mother,’ she says, sounding bored.

‘I don’t remember when she said she’d come . . .’

‘There’s quite a lot you’d think you would remember,’ she says, tapping the laptop with one hand and reaching for her trolley with the other.

The staff can be very rude here. But I don’t get upset by it. And she does have a point: I don’t quite remember how my wrist got so cut up but I presume I must have done it; it would seem most unlikely to get randomly stabbed in vertical stripes.