Patrick stormed down Madison Avenue with his father on his arm. The brown-paper bag occasionally crashed into a passer-by who was unwise enough not to get out of the way.

By the time he reached Sixty-first Street, Patrick realized that it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit, or insulted. The poor man had had to confine himself to blows and insults for the last fourteen years, and insults alone for the last six.

The tragedy of old age, when a man is too weak to hit his own child. No wonder he had died. Even his rudeness had been flagging towards the end, and he had been forced to introduce a note of repulsive self-pity to ward off any counter-attack.

‘Your trouble,’ snarled Patrick, as he swept past the doorman of his hotel, ‘is that you’re mentally ill.’

‘You mustn’t say those things to your poor old father,’ he murmured, shaking imaginary heart pills into a bunched and twisted palm.

Bastard. Nobody should do that to anybody else.

Never mind, never tell.

Stop thinking about it right now.

‘Right now,’ said Patrick out loud.

Death and destruction. Buildings swallowed by flame as he passed. Windows shattering at a glance. An inaudible jugular-bursting scream. No prisoners.

‘Death and destruction,’ he muttered. Christ, he was really anxious now, really very fucking anxious.

Patrick imagined sliding a chainsaw through the neck of the lift operator. Wave after wave of shame and violence, ungovernable shame and violence.

If thy head offend thee, cut it off. Incinerate it and trample it into ash. No prisoners, no pity. Tamburlaine’s black tent. My favourite colour! It’s so chic.

‘Which floor, sir?’

What are you staring at, fuckface?

‘Thirty-nine.’

Steps. Over-associative. Over-accelerated. Sedation. Scalpel. Patrick flicked out his hand. Anaesthetic first, surely, Doctor?

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument. Scalpel first, anaesthetic afterward. The Dr Death Method. You know it makes sense.

Whose idea was it to put him on the thirty-ninth floor? What were they trying to do? Drive him mad? Hide under the sofa. Must hide under the sofa.

Nobody can find me there. What if nobody finds me there? What if they do?

Patrick burst into the room, dropped the brown-paper bag, and threw himself onto the floor. He rolled over towards the sofa, lay on his back, and tried to squirm underneath the skirt of the sofa.

What was he doing? He was going mad. Can’t get under the sofa anymore. Too big now. Six foot two. No longer a child.

Fuck that. He lifted the sofa into the air and insinuated his body underneath it, lowering it again onto his chest.

And he lay there in his overcoat and his eyepatch, with the sofa covering him up to his neck, like a coffin built for a smaller man.