When they see me looking, the stallholders start to demonstrate with their dolls, twisting them apart, taking out each nested doll from within, setting them out in a row like ducklings following their mother. It’s mesmerising, and joyful, and I feel another wave of deeply hidden emotions threatening to push themselves up and out of me. A wave of panic and dizziness hits me, and for a moment, all of the dolls seem to be un-nesting themselves, coming towards me, circling me, and I take a step back and try to breathe, but it’s too hard to catch my breath – my throat starts to close up and the light around me begins to shrink until there’s nothing but a pinprick.

There is chattering in Russian, and shrieks of children and the clatter of the old rollercoaster as it whizzes around above my head, and I feel myself falling, blackness taking over and I want it to end … and then … arms, grabbing my arms, someone talking in my ear. I feel weightless, and then I feel nothing.

I come to on a bench, my head between my legs, staring down at cracked concrete. Someone is rubbing my back.

‘Hey, you’re back. You kinda scared me a bit then.’

I don’t know who this is. I turn my head slowly in the direction of the voice – American, I think, or it could be Canadian. I can’t really tell the difference.

‘Hey yourself,’ I manage. My mouth feels like sandpaper. Tastes like shit.

I sit up slowly, and wriggle away slightly, so he stops rubbing my back.

‘Do you need to be sick? Here, I got you some water.’

He hands me a plastic bottle, the cap already off, and in other times I would query this as being very unsafe, but right now I need water, and if he’s decided to drug me then good on him, because I’m not too scared of oblivion. I’ve often thought that date-rape drugs are the best way to go, because if you can’t remember what happened, then did it really happen at all? More rational people would question this logic, but I am long past any form of rationale. I gulp the water down and sit up.

‘Who’re you, then? My guardian angel?’

He laughs. ‘I’m Brad. I saw you pass out and I thought you might need a friend.’

He’s being nice and I should thank him, but part of me remains deeply cynical about people who like to ‘help’. What’s in it for him? I give him a proper once-over, and decide that a lot could be in it for him, as it happens, and maybe for me. He’s late thirties, fresh faced, well dressed – in that preppy kind of way that I wouldn’t normally go for, but that screams money, and that is really the prevailing thought in my head right now.