‘John Joe,’ Josephine said, in a return to schoolmarm fashion,’understand one thing. You’re as sick as your secrets; as long as you live a lie, you will continue to drink. And if you continue to drink you will die. Soon.’

Scary stuff.

‘There’s a lot of work to be done, John Joe, on how you’ve lived your life, but we’ve broken through a big barrier here today. Stay with the feelings.

‘And as for the rest of you, I know not all of you are latent homosexuals or lesbians. But don’t think that just because you’re not, that you can’t still be alcoholics and addicts.’

Later that day a new inmate arrived. I first got wind of it when Chaquie rushed into the dining-room after lunch and screeched ‘We’ve a new girl! I saw her when I was doing the hoovering.’

I wasn’t happy when I heard the new arrival was a girl. I had competition enough from Misty O’Bloody Malley for Chris’s attention.

Luckily the new girl was possibly the fattest woman I’d ever seen in real life. I’d seen some people as ginormous as her on Geraldo but I didn’t believe they actually existed. She was sitting in the dining-room when we returned from afternoon group. Dr Billings introduced her as Angela, then went off.

Chris sidled up to me.

My heart leapt, then he said ‘Rachel, why don’t you go and talk to Angela?’

‘Me?’ I said. ‘Why me?’

‘Why not? Go on,’ he urged. ‘She’ll probably be more comfortable talking to women just now. Go on. Remember how frightened you were on your first day.’

I started to say ‘But it was different for me,’ but I wanted to please him. So I stuck a smile on and went over to her. Mike joined me and we attempted to have a chat.

Neither of us asked her what she was in for, although we suspected it might have something to do with food and eating too much of it.

She looked scared and miserable and I found myself saying ‘Don’t worry, my first day was awful but it gets better,’ even though I didn’t mean it.

Don and Eddie were shouting at each other across the table because Don had spilt a drop of tea on Eddie’s paper. Eddie was insisting that Don pay for a new one but Don was adamantly insisting that he wouldn’t. I knew how harmless the row was, but Angela looked horrified by it. So Mike and I tried to cheer her up about it.

‘Eddie’s furious.’ I laughed. ‘Although a fat lot of… er… good it’ll do him.’

As I said ‘fat’ I found that I’d made eye-contact with Angela and the moment went on for ever. I hated myself. I was always putting my foot in things. Always.

‘But Don’s such a little Hitler, it’s about time someone cut him down to…’ Mike froze, then forced himself to finish, ‘size,’ he muttered.

‘It’s only a newspaper, after all,’ I said, with forced jollity. ‘Not some huge, weighty matter. It’s no big deal.’ To my horror,’ weighty’ and ‘big’ came out much louder than I had intended.

I could feel beads of sweat on my upper lip.

Did I see Angela flinch?

Then Fergus, who had been trying to adjudicate the Don/Eddie scrap, lurched over to us.

‘How’s it goin’?’ He nodded at Angela and sat down.

‘Man.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Really heavy.’

We all tensed. Rigor mortis nearly set in.

‘Don and Eddie, do you mean?’ I asked, anxiously trying to smooth things over.

‘Yeah,’ sighed oblivious Fergus. ‘Like Eddie really thinks he’ll get money out of Don? FAT CHANCE.’

‘You’d think Don would display a little… largesse…’ I faltered. ‘I mean, generosity.’

I was sweating buckets by then.

‘It’s a huge waste,’ Eddie shouted at Don. To Mike and me, it sounded more like ‘HUGE WAIST’.

‘Oh look,’ Stalin shouted. ‘Look at the BIG ARSE… Mumble, mumble.’

It transpired he was looking at the football pages and Arsenal had had a big win, but it didn’t sound like that.

I was a limp rag.

Next, Peter came over and sat down with us. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

‘Hello,’ he said to Angela, ‘I’m Peter.’

‘Angela.’ She smiled nervously.

‘Well,’ he barked with a fake laugh, ‘there’s no need to ask you why you’re here.’

I nearly passed out.

‘Maybe Angela and Eamonn will fall in love,’ Don suggested later, his hands clasped, his eyes aglow. ‘Wouldn’t that be lovely? And they’d have lots of lovely, bouncing babies.’

‘You can’t say that,’ tutted Vincent.

‘Why not?’ Don demanded. ‘Didn’t Liz Taylor and Larry Foreskinsky meet at a treatment centre? Love stories can happen, dreams can come true.’

I wondered if Don’s homosexuality was still too latent for him to have discovered Judy Garland. If so, I really must bring her to his attention.

Twice a day, for the rest of the week, I sweated terror-stricken buckets in case Josephine read out the questionnaire in group. But she didn’t and I tentatively began to hope that she mightn’t at all. Despite being saved, it didn’t stop me from completely burning up whenever I thought of Luke. Which was most of the time. I lurched from boiling rage where I planned terrible vengeance to whimpering confusion as I wondered why he’d been so cruel to me.

Being with the other inmates gave me a strange, unexpected comfort. They were nearly all wildly enthusiastic in their condemnation of Luke and very affectionate to me.

However, I liked to think that whenever Chris hugged me it meant more. Because we weren’t in the same group, I only saw him at meal times and in the evenings. But he always took care to come and sit beside me after dinner. I looked forward to seeing him, to us having a special, private little chat. At times, I was almost able to convince myself that being trapped in the Cloisters wasn’t an entirely bad thing. Such close proximity to each other was bound to help our budding relationship along.

The week carried on.

On Wednesday, Chaquie read her life story, which was mild and tame.

On Thursday, one of Clarence’s brothers came as his Involved Significant Other but, as Clarence was no longer in denial about his alcoholism, there were no surprises. In fact, Clarence kept beating his brother to the punchlines of each horror story.