For the first time I felt relief. It was a relief to stop fighting, to stop resisting the insistent knowledge that my life and behaviour weren’t normal. And it was a relief to know that I wasn’t mad or stupid or useless, all that was wrong was that I was immature and had low self-worth, which would improve by staying away from mood-altering chemicals. The future looked promising. It all seemed so very straightforward.

Over the next week a whole load of other things fell into place once I accepted all that stuff about my low self-esteem. It explained why I’d thrown myself at men who didn’t want me. As Josephine said on my fourth-last day in group, ‘You got them to reinforce your own sense of self-loathing.’

And it explained why most men didn’t seem to want me.

‘You were too needy,’ Josephine said. ‘You scared them away with the big, gaping hole you had in your soul.’

I was high with understanding, marvelling at the wonders of psychotherapy. I would get over Luke and have a lovely relationship with some other man.

‘And now let’s talk about your unhealthy attitude to food,’ Josephine announced. My happiness fell from the sky like a stone.

‘You abuse food almost as much as you abused drugs,’ she said. ‘You were like a skeleton when you arrived…’

‘Ah, go ’way, I was not,’ I joshed, hanging my head, smiling warmly with pride.

‘You see!’ she screeched. ‘Unhealthy, very unhealthy. It stems from the same source as your drug addiction. You avoid your immaturity and defects by focusing on something you think you can control, that is, your weight. But you can’t change your inside by changing your outside.

‘All that starving and bingeing you do,’ she said. I began to object, but she cut across me. ‘We’ve been watching you, Rachel, we know. You’re obsessed with your weight. Although it doesn’t stop you going on plenty of chocolate and crisp binges.’

I lowered my head in shame.

‘You’ve got to admit,’ she said slyly, ‘for all that song and dance you made about your vegetarian food, you didn’t go hungry.’

But nothing could dampen my spirits for long. I was in such irrepressible good form I was prepared to acknowledge Josephine might have had a point about my attitude to food. Why not? By then I was an old hand at believing six impossible things before breakfast. I’d accepted I was a drug addict, why not throw a food disorder in for the laugh? Any other aberrations you can think of?

It wasn’t a problem, because as Josephine said ‘Fix the source of one, and you’ll fix them all.’

‘I’m really looking forward to my new life,’ I sang joyously to Misty that afternoon in the dining-room.

‘Go easy,’ Misty urged anxiously. ‘Not everything falls magically into place the minute you stop. Knowing why you took drugs is only the tip of the iceberg. You’ve got to learn how to live without them and that’s not easy. Look at what happened to me. I relapsed.’

‘Ah, no,’ I smiled, touched by her concern. ‘That won’t happen to me, I’m determined to make a go of things.’

‘Will you go back to New York?’ she asked.

I instantly felt confused and fearful. And very fucking angry. My rosy outlook on life hadn’t extended as far as Luke and Brigit, the bastards.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever go back to New fucking York again,’ I muttered.

‘Are you worried about what those glamorous people will say?’ she asked. ‘What’s your one’s name? Helenka?’

‘Helenka?’ I hooted. ‘No, she’s always horrible about everyone and I couldn’t be bothered anymore.’

I briefly savoured that feeling of liberation before saying gloomily, ‘No, it’s Luke fucking Costello and Brigit fucking Lenehan I have problems with.’

‘You’ll have to go back,’ said Misty the sage. She was starting to annoy me. ‘You’ll have to make your peace with them.’

‘I’ll never make my peace with those bastards!’

The night before I left, Josephine took me into her office for a private session. Everyone got a one-to-one with their counsellor just before they left. Like a football team getting one last talking to from their manager before the big match.

And basically she told me I could do nothing when I got out.

‘No drugs, and that includes alcohol. No starving, bingeing or excessive exercise. And, most importantly of all, stay away from relationships with the opposite sex for a year.’

I almost passed out. I thought you were my friend.

‘But why?’ I hooted.

‘You’ve an unhealthy attitude to men. Without drugs, there’s going to be a big gap in your life. A lot of people latch onto relationships to avoid being alone with themselves. You’d probably be one of them.’

Cheeky bitch, I thought, offended.

‘We say the same to everyone when they leave here,’ she pointed out.

Everyone? I wondered, thinking of Chris.

‘It’s only for a year,’ she added kindly.

She might as well have said a hundred of them.

‘In that case I’m going back to New York,’ I said sulkily. ‘Even if I don’t want to be celibate there, it’d be enforced upon me.’

‘No New York,’ she said. ‘Give yourself a year to get better.

‘And are you trying to tell me you were celibate with Luke?’ she asked with a sly smile.

I managed to forbear from letting rip a string of expletives about Luke, but my hatred for him was obvious from the look on my face.

‘Luke is an exceptional man,’ Josephine said. ‘You may not think so yet, but he did the right thing by you.’

I said nothing.

‘He’s loyal, has integrity, intelligence and he’s very…’ she paused and kind of patted her hair ‘handsome.’

I was astonished. So the old bat was human after all!

But not for long.

‘Now that you’re going out into the outside world,’ she said sternly, ‘the hard work is only beginning. You’ll have to come to terms with your past and learn new responses to every situation life throws at you. It won’t always be easy.’

I wasn’t fazed. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, but I felt my willingness would overcome anything.