I could no longer see the door to my room. Who was in there if not the nurse? Was it my former attacker, whoever had tried to interfere with me? Perhaps I ought to go to the door, fling it open, confront them, the noise and commotion of course attracting the attention of the duty nurse. Or perhaps I should just approach the duty nurse directly and tell him there was somebody in my room, let him deal with whoever it was.

I had decided on the latter course and was about to step out from behind the fire-equipment cupboard and walk towards the duty nurse’s station, when, from the far end of the corridor, I heard a toilet flush.

A door creaked and closed. I stepped along the wall to the nearest door, twisted the handle and let myself in. This should be a private visiting room, empty at this time of night. Sound came from somewhere near the toilets. Slipper-slapping footsteps came, and I recognised one of the old boys, a not-quite slack-jaw capable of holding a conversation and talking about something other than television or the weather. He went, head hunched, past where I watched via the cracked door.

Somebody said something and he looked up, waving down the corridor, no doubt at the duty nurse. I opened the door a little further to watch him go. When he was opposite the door to my room, a couple of doors short of his own room, the door to my room was flung open and light spilled out. “Mr Kel?” I heard a strong male voice say.

The old guy stood looking confused, staring blinking at whoever had addressed him from my room and then down the corridor. I heard seat wheels squeal as the nurse said something, voice inflected in a question.

Then a bright light shone into the old fellow’s face, he put his hand up to shield his eyes, the duty nurse shouted something, the bright light went out and a man – tall, well-built, in a dark suit – went running past me and away down the corridor towards the stair well. He held a chunky-looking torch in one hand. In the other hand he was carrying something else. He thrust it inside his jacket as he ran past me. It was dark and heavy-looking and I knew it was a gun.

So:

“Can I leave?” I ask Dr Valspitter. “Can I go? Please?”

She smiles. “Perhaps. I will need other doctor to come to same opinion, but I think you can.”

“Wonderful! Can we get other doctor, their opinion, today?”

“You are in such a hurry to leave?”

“I am. I want to get out,” I say. “Today.”

She shakes her head, frowning just a little. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow if other doctor agrees with me and we can complete all required paperwork and provide you with clothing and belongings and money and so on. Maybe tomorrow. I cannot promise. But soon, I think. Maybe tomorrow. We shall see. You must understand. You must be patient.”

I want to protest, but I am aware that I have pushed things quite far enough already. If I seem too desperate to get out they might take that as a sign that I’m unbalanced or neurotic or something. I do my best to smile. “Tomorrow, then,” I say. “I hope,” I add, before the frowning doctor can reiterate that it’s still only maybe.

“No!” I wail, staring at the two beige pills lying in the bottom of the little cup. The cup is colourless, translucent plastic, and tiny; a stingy measure of drink if you were serving spirits in it, and yet to me it seems like it’s as deep, dark and dangerous as a mine shaft. I stare hopelessly into it and despair. “I not want to!” I am aware that I sound like a recalcitrant child.

“You must,” the old nurse tells me. She is starting to lose patience with me, I can tell. “They harmless, Mr Kel. They give you a good night’s sleep, that’s all.”

“But I sleep good!”

“Doctor say you must have them, Mr Kel,” the old nurse tells me firmly, as though this trumps everything. “Do you want me to go and get doctor?”

This is a threat. If she fetches a doctor and I still refuse to take the sleeping pills I may well find that such a protest too will count against me when I ask to be released from the clinic. “Please not make me,” I say, biting my bottom lip. Perhaps I can appeal to her emotions. This is only partially an act. However, she is not moved. She has seen it all before. Perhaps a younger nurse might have been persuaded but this old one is taking no nonsense.

“Very well, we get doctor.” She turns to go and I have to reach out to her and say,

“No! All right!” She turns back, and at least has the decency not to look smug. “I take them,” I tell her.

First line of defence: I think I can fool her and just keep the pills under my tongue until she has gone and then spit them out, but she insists on inspecting my mouth afterwards and so I have no choice but to swallow them.

Second line of defence: I’ll go to the toilets and throw them up. But the nurse is watching for me to do this as she goes down the corridor dispensing drugs and twice shoos me back to bed with the threat that she’ll inject me with a sedative if I insist on going to the toilets. She knows I already went not ten minutes ago.

Third line of defence: I’ll throw up here in my room, into my water jug or out of the window if I have to. I can sign myself out voluntarily if I have to. Everything subsequently will be harder if I have done so – the finding a place to live and a job and so on – but not impossible. I am not stupid, I can survive.

Some time later I am vaguely aware of being pushed gently upright and something – the water jug, perhaps – being taken out of my hands. I am tucked into bed and the light is turned out. I feel very sleepy and in a way happy to be so, cosy in my wrapping of sheets and the feeling of dozing quietly off, while another part of me is shrieking with fury and terror, screaming at me to wake up and get away, do something, anything.

He comes for me again during that night. The drug still holds me, and it is as though everything happens through layers and layers of swaddling, through multiple bundlings of something insulating and muddling, making everything vague and fuzzy round the edges.

There is an impression of the quality of the light and sound around me changing somehow, of the door being opened and closed very quietly. And then there is the feeling that somebody else is here in the room with me. At first I feel no sense of threat. I have a vague, groundless and completely stupid feeling that this person is here to protect and look after me, to tend to me. Then I feel something happening to my bed. I still persist with the vague sensation that all is well and I am being cared for. They must be tucking me in. How nice. How like being a child, safe and warm and loved and quietly looked after.

But I am not being looked after, and the bed is being unmade, not made, untucked, sheets and blanket loosened, a way being made clear.

I feel the sliding, spiderly-creeping, probing hand slide into the bed and over my body at my hip. I feel my pyjamas being touched and investigated and then the cord that ties them being found, and – gently at first – tugged at. The knot does not give, and the tugging becomes harder, more impatient and aggressive.

In all of this it is as though I am watching everything on a screen, feeling it not as something that is happening to me but as something that is happening somewhere else to somebody else and the sensations accompanying the experience – the sensations that are the experience – are being transmitted to me through some technology or ability I have not heard of. I am dissociated from what’s going on. This is not happening, or at least not to me. So I have no need to react, to try to do anything, because what good would that do? It’s not happening to me.

Except, of course – as one part of my mind has known all along, and is still bellowing and yowling about – it entirely is happening to me.

The hand undoes the knot on my pyjama bottoms and pulls them forcibly down. There is a roughness and an urgency to the hand’s movements now that was not there before. I think that whoever is doing this realises that I am truly in a deeply drugged sleep and so am not likely to wake up and start resisting or screaming. And there is, too – horribly, horribly – a feeling of something like the uncaring passion that infects lovers, when they cannot wait to get at each other, when clothes are ripped off the self and the other, when hands shake, when bruises happen, unmeant, unfelt at the time, when shouts and screams and crashings and bangings ring out without a care who hears them, when we abandon ourselves utterly to something that is neither fully ourselves or them any more but something that lies between us, aside from us, beyond us. I think I can remember feeling like that: wanting somebody like that, being wanted like that. This – this single-handed furtiveness, this selfish, unmindful groping, however urgent, however needy – dear fuck, this is a sad, pathetic, petty thing in comparison.