Extracts from The Angel Makers - She Never Speaks

She never answers, but still, I talk to her all the time. Listen, I tell her. I've made mistakes. When it first started, sometimes I would try to pretend that I was helpless in all of it, that I'd been buffeted by fate; that as surely as those eight women are twisting in the wind now, in my way, I've been twisting in the wind my whole life. It's not true, though; it's just a lie that I told myself when I wasn't feeling strong enough to face up to what I am, and what I've done. In truth, I've made my choices, and my hand is strong in all of this. Without me, none of this would have even started.

I'm twenty-eight, but I look older, and that doesn't even come close to how old I feel. That's not so unusual where I come from. In the city, I've heard that women are cosseted and coddled, treated like elaborate ornaments or playthings. Here, we carry our parents and our husbands and our children on our backs; we're the dumping ground for all of life's shit. Judit taught me that early on, and nothing I've gone through since has gone any way towards disproving it. They used to wonder why I was still alive; in the villages, people regularly kill themselves over less than I've endured.

When I was small, maybe eight or nine, Katalin Remény, aged sixteen, drowned herself because she was pregnant without a husband. She was hauled out of the river – at a time when bodies in the river were far rarer than they have been recently – and at her funeral her body was paraded through the streets, surrounded by howling mourners, but of course she had to be buried outside the churchyard because of her sins, and later, Judit and my father went to pour boiling water over her grave, to stop her from stalking the village in death, as suicides are said to do.

Judit came to speak to me a few days after Katalin was buried, and I remember she was hissing and spitting with fury: she told me that what Katalin had done was pointless and meaningless, that having a baby without a husband was only a sin in the eyes of those people who want to control women, and that, in any case, if a woman ever found herself with a baby that she didn't want, she could always come to Judit and Judit would take care of it – though, at that age, I only had a vague idea of what ‘taking care of it' meant.

Like with most of Judit's rages, it was born out of a desire to protect me, and it worked. Katalin took up residence in my mind, a symbol of the opposite of everything I was going to be; a mindless, sacrificial lamb, caring more about the opinions of a few stupid villagers than her own life. I knew that I would never give up my own life if there were any alternative left to me in the world, and as it's happened, I could never be accused of failing to seek out as many alternatives as possible.

That's at the root of it all, I explain to her: my survival instinct, my will to live. That's behind all the choices I've made. I could have given myself up at any number of points, and I suppose it would have saved lives. But not my life, and not her life, and that's all I'm looking out for. I've learnt that it's too painful and dangerous to care about much else.

Is it odd that I feel like this, given the twenty-eight years I've had? Maybe I should have accepted the bitter slice of life I got as something easy to surrender. But once I got it between my teeth, I was never going to let it go without the most violent struggle. What's good about life? Ask me that when you're watching a summer moon, bloated and white, floating over the plain. Ask me that when you're looking into my child's face. Of course, there are terrible things too, and sometimes – often – they outweigh the good. But you can't have beauty without a bit of terror.