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could still hear this woman, this wounded animal, whoever she was. And her noise was filling up my cell. ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
    ‘OI! ICE CREAM GIRL!’ bellowed a voice from somewhere. ‘SHUT UP! Some of us are trying to sleep.’
    ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ It was me. I was making that noise. I was the wounded animal. It was me who had been hit with reality. It was me showing the outside world inside these prison walls that I was in agony and I was scared and I was here for ever.
    It was me being so loud.
    It was me. And I didn’t know how to stop.
    Water falls on my skin like a hundred thousand little kisses, each one firm and warm and perfect.
    I lather my arms again – the third time – and immerse myself further in the extravagance of a shower with temperature control and strength above a dribble. It beats down on me like a relentless rain, the type that used to clean the windows in Trembry Hall, and I am revelling in it. I could spend the whole day in this cubicle, reacquainting myself with the finer points of washing. Sometimes we weren’t given access to the shower for three or four days; we had to make do with the sink in the corner, using our towels as flannels and washing over ourselves as quickly as possible to stop from freezing to death.
    Staying in this shower, washing off the last twenty years inside, is helpful, too, because I don’t really know what I’m going to do next. I mean literally, after this shower, what do I do next? Every day for more than twenty years has been structured, regimented, with a time for everything. Now I am free, I can do as I please. And I’m not sure how. In my head, in my wildest dreamings, I had thought I would spend the day with Mum and Dad. We would sit down and talk, eat, drink, catch up on all the missing years. They’d even call my sister, Bella, and my brother, Logan, get them to come over and we’d catch up as a family. In my reality, in the life I was actually living . . . I shudder as I think about yesterday.
    When Mum opened the door, I expected a rush of emotion from one of us. I expected to want to throw my arms around her, to hold her close in the hope that she would do the same to me. I expected to want to bury my face in the soft crease of her neck and cry. Really cry. Cry my aches inside out. Wash away the years with tears, have her dry them with sympathy and understanding and being my mum.
    Instead, a barrier rose between us the second she opened the door.
    ‘Poppy,’ she’d said.
    ‘Mum,’ I said. The word was unfamiliar in my mouth, since I had not said it in so very long.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. Her eyes scanned behind me, and I realised she was checking to see if any of their neighbours in the identical thirties semis along the road were looking, and she was checking to see if the Old Bill were lurking somewhere ready to haul me back to the nick.
    The barrier, wide and solid and invisible, rooted itself even more firmly into the ground and thickened. Not only did she think I had escaped, she also thought me to be stupid. If I had done a bunk, this would have been the first place the Old Bill would have looked so why would I turn up here?
    ‘They let me out. Remember? I wrote to you? Told you I was coming out? Asked if it was OK to stay with you until I got back on my feet?’
    ‘I don’t think I got the letter,’ she’d said. Her face said, ‘Did you really write to me or are you lying to me, which will lead to me being arrested for helping you?’
    ‘It wasn’t returned to me, so I presumed you’d got it.’
    ‘You should have called to double-check,’ she said.
    ‘I would have if, when you changed your number ten years ago, you’d given me the new one.’
    The wrinkled skin on her neck and the smoother skin on her high cheekbones coloured up at that, while she dropped her gaze from looking just left of my head to down at her feet. She was hesitating, waiting . . .