I felt furious, sick and frightened. Panicky, almost. So when Nola said, ‘Are you OK, Rachel? You look a bit…’ it was a relief to blurt out, ‘I was like that too, always thinking about it.’

‘I’m not happy,’ I said, sounding slightly hysterical. ‘I’m not happy at all. I don’t want to be this way.’

I could feel the others looking at me and I wished they weren’t there. Especially Chris. I didn’t want him to be a witness to my weakness, but I was too frightened to hide it. Beseechingly, I looked at Nola, desperate to be told that everything would be OK.

In fairness to her, she tried.

‘Look at me now,’ she smiled gently. ‘I never think about drugs. I’m free from all that.

‘And look at you,’ she added. ‘You’ve been in here – how long? – four weeks. You haven’t used drugs in any of that time.’

I hadn’t. In fact, an awful lot of the time I hadn’t thought about drugs at all. Of course, some of the time I had. But not all the time, not the way I had five weeks previously.

With that, I had a small glimpse of freedom, a picture of a different life zipped through me before I was cast back into fear and confusion.

As Nola was leaving, she tore a page out of her diary and wrote something on it. ‘My number,’ she said, giving it to me. ‘When you get out, give me a ring. Any time you want to chat, just give me a shout.’

Dazedly, I found myself giving her my number, it seemed the polite thing to do. Then I dragged myself to the dining-room where Eddie had spread the contents of a bag of wine gums out on the table. ‘I knew it,’ he shouted, making me jump. ‘I just knew it.’

‘What did you know?’ someone asked. I listened with half an ear. Don’t let Luke be right.

‘That there’s more yellow ones than any other colour,’ Eddie declared. ‘And fewer black ones. Look! Two black ones. Five red ones. Five green ones. Eight orange ones. And eight… nine… ten… twelve, no fewer than twelve yellow ones. It’s not right. Everyone buys them for the black ones and instead we’re being fobbed off with manky, horrible yellow ones.’

‘I don’t mind yellow ones,’ another voice chipped in.

‘You sick bastard,’ yet another person said.

A rowdy argument broke out about the yellow wine gums, but I had no interest. I was too busy trying to assess the damage to my life. Wondering, if I had to give up drugs for a while – and it was a big if, mind – how I would cope. What would I do? I’d never have fun, that was for sure. Not that I’d been having much fun anyway, it had to be admitted. But, as far as I could see, my life would be over. I might as well be dead.

There was always the option of cutting down, I thought, grasping at straws. But I’d tried to cut down in the past and I hadn’t. Hadn’t been able to, I realized, dread piling on fear. Once I started I could never get enough.

Further dissent broke out around me because Stalin knew all the answers to the new Trivial Pursuit questions, to Vincent’s perplexity.

‘But how?’ Vincent whined over and over again. ‘But how?’

‘Dunno.’ Stalin shrugged. ‘I read the papers.’

‘But…’ Vincent said despairingly. You could see that he was dying to say, ‘But you’re working-class, you’re not supposed to know the capital of Uzbekistan.’ But that wasn’t the way he behaved anymore.

It was a glorious release to go to sleep that night, to escape my shocked, racing brain for a while. But I woke with a jump in the middle of the night, jolted into consciousness by another shift in my psyche’s plates. This time it was a horrible memory of when Brigit caught me stealing twenty dollars from her purse. I’d been stealing, I thought as I lay in bed. That was a disgusting thing to do. But at the time I hadn’t thought it was terrible. I’d felt nothing. She’d been promoted, I’d reasoned, she could afford it. I couldn’t understand how I’d ever thought that way.

And then, to my heartfelt relief, I was OK again.

On Saturday morning, before cookery, when Chris slung his arm around me and murmured ‘How are you now?’ I was able to smile and say ‘Much better.’

Of course, I still couldn’t sleep for thinking about how I’d get my revenge on Luke, but the future looked brighter, still intact. Not the broken-up disaster area it had been about to become.

Once again, I started to take enjoyment in the things that had made me happy since I’d come to the Cloisters. Namely, the rows. On Monday night there was a humdinger between Chaquie and Eddie about fruit pastilles. Black ones. Eddie roared at Chaquie ‘When I said you could have one I didn’t mean that you could have a black one.’

Chaquie was flushed and upset. ‘Well, there’s very little I can do about it now.’

She stuck out her tongue displaying the remains of the pastille. ‘Do you want this?’ she demanded, approaching Eddie with the sliver on her tongue. ‘Well, do you?’

There were shouts of ‘Good girl, yerself, Chaquie,’ and, ‘Give him black pastilles where he’ll feel it!’

‘Jesus,’ said Barry the child, admiringly. ‘I nearly like that Chaquie wan, now.’

58

Later that week it became clear that my horrors hadn’t disappeared. They had simply regrouped, before launching a fresh onslaught.

It was like playing space invaders. The memories hurtled towards me like missiles. Faster and faster, each more shaming and more painful than the last.

Initially I deflected them quite easily.

Brigit crying and begging me to stop taking drugs. I destroyed it with a POW!

Borrowing money from Gaz when I knew he was skint, then not paying him back. BAM!

Coming to on the floor of my bedroom in the dim light, not knowing if it was dawn or dusk. ZAP!

Taking a sickie on Martine’s day off so she had to come in to work. KAPOW!

Waking up in a strange bed with a strange man, not remembering whether I’d had sex with him.

Whoops, lost a life there.

The memories got bigger and more powerful, with less of a gap between them. Not so many lives left now. Harder to fight it all off.

Going to Luke’s work party off my head and embarrassing him so much he had to take me home at nine o’clock. BIFF!

Drinking the bottle of champagne Jos égave Brigit for her birthday, then lying about it. CRASH!