My hand is bucked, my fingers bent beneath my palm. I can reach the paperclip with the tip of my middle finger. I try to coax it out of my sleeve, but my fingertip is too sweaty to get purchase. The flash of his camera goes off in my face and I close my eyes against the white. I strain my hand, the tendons stretched, and manage to get the end of the clip under my finger. More flashes in my face from the camera. Slowly, I drag the paperclip out along the lifeline of my palm; the cool steel moving over the grooves and valleys that some people believe predict my life and my death.

Another flash.

He moves the camera in closer and I just want to bite the lens off it.

My jaws ache so much and the anaesthetic is starting to wear off. That smell in the room. The chill in this place. The cramp in my left thigh from being taped down like a butterfly pinned into a frame.

A gunshot outside. At least I think it is, but it’s difficult to tell. I hope it is. Come this way, team. Hunt inside this horror of a train carriage. Release the dogs and pull your triggers. End this.

He washes his gloves again and says, ‘I’m just going to…’ And then his eyes widen and he says, ‘Would you like your hearing aids back in, now the drilling phase is over?’

I nod as hard as I have ever nodded. My head only moves slightly up and down but it’s enough.

‘Nurse, please.’

She walks in through the shower curtain. Her hair glows red in the anglepoise light. She puts in my aids and her fingers feel clumsy and intrusive. Too much touch around my lobes. Too much probing. I’d bite my tongue if this mouth retractor would let me.

‘Now, that’s better,’ he says. ‘I’m going to clamp this around your tooth so I can create a permanent crown. Let me know if it’s uncomfortable.’

Nothing about this is comfortable. My cramp, my jaw ache. The fact that I need to pee. The pain in my jawbone from the tooth root being removed. Whatever he did to the nerve.

Julia sucks out my mouth with the tube.

‘If only your father could see you now,’ she says to Tobias.

Tobias looks at her and smiles and says, ‘Batteries.’

She hooks up a rechargeable lithium-battery pack to one of the lights.

‘Hold quite still,’ he says.

Bastard.

He clamps something round my tooth. It’s not painful but I can feel the pressure of it. An alien thing in my mouth.

He mixes some kind of compound with a small plastic spoon.