It was the last year I was there, and probably the hardest - this was before I knew I was going home. I was in the roughest shape I can remember being in: hair thin, face pale and all the rest, and I’d taken to crying occasionally in the bathroom at work which I had never done, not even when pregnant and adverts on telly for donkey sanctuaries could make me feel some kind of way. Someone noticed (someone always does) and said not unkindly, you know she doesn’t only just see the kids, some of the staff go too.

Turned out, a lot of the staff did, it was that kind of place. It would be good to talk to someone who didn’t have a stake in any part of my mess, and who could listen without judgement. I sat down in her bright little office, opened my mouth and my life fell out, even the part I don’t talk about anymore. It doesn’t bother me now, I remember telling her, it’s just one more thing that’s happened in a long series of things that have happened, I don’t even think about it anymore, and it’s true, I don’t — I don’t think about that, but I do sometimes think about all the things that led me there to where it happened, and all the things that have happened since.

I sometimes like to say I was a highly unsupervised child, and I was, part of this was the time I grew up in, and part of it a quirk of who I was born to. Highly unsupervised: it’s funny, the things I learned to do well and young because no one ever told me no. When I tell it, I do it with the laugh track on, just like the endless sitcoms of my childhood that played from a television that was only switched off at the end of the night, when the national anthem played. Salome was her name, sitting with her kind and open face, and this time when I told her the laugh track was off, or the reel skipped.

Of course now I want to make jokes about veils and revelations, and dancing girls, and isn’t it funny that her name was Salome. Isn’t it funny? Of course it is, because it is a fact that I’m a dancer and I always have been but I don’t have seven veils or even seventy, what I do is a slow reveal and I never get to the end of it, I leave them wanting more until they don’t, until we are both exhausted by it.

Isn’t it funny? Believe me when I say I laughed until I cried, and Salome with her calm face watching me with curiosity and some compassion — that’s what did it, the lethal combo, through my tears I heard a voice say finish her and then it was my head on the block, on the platter, and I was done.