Only in the presence of the therapist lady, in her pleasant consulting room hung with tasteful abstract prints, with her fresh flowers on the coffee table, with her acronyms—PTSD, OCD, CBT, there were others—after the weariness had come the rage. Her theory, carefully laid out, made sense. She put forward that there were defenses, defense mechanisms, established in our vulnerable childhoods, necessary at the time, but unhelpful and restrictive in adulthood, needing, via the painstaking work of therapy, dismantling. But the nicer she had been, the gentler, the more it made me want to kill her.

The last thing she said to me was “People often make the mistake of thinking that children who have neglectful or abusive parents must love them less. It’s more bearable.”

I walked for a while. It was mizzling a bit. My wanderings took me into the park. The characters were eternal, familiar to everyone. The mothers with their prams. The man in a cheap suit staring vacantly at a flower bed from one of the benches. Teenagers dodging school, playing some kind of game. One had turned away, was trudging off toward the gates, shoulders hunched in misery. He was not playing anymore. The game was spoiled. What can I say? It struck me as familiar.

The mad man waving his hands as he raged at the pigeons. What language was he speaking? What was he saying—something about daughters? And her, why didn’t she have a coat on? Why was she chasing that man, and plucking at his clothes? That yellow lady, yellow for her eyes, and skin, and teeth. When he shoved her, she fell, but was up again, quick as a flash, yelping until he turned and shook his fist at her and she slunk away.

I passed him further on. He had taken up a place on a bench, beer in hand. Tattoos were crawling up his arms, climbing up his neck. He sat at the center of a pool of shattered glass. When would I be finished with the likes of him?

Men were like dogs. Once you’d been bitten a couple of times, you just couldn’t feel the same about them as a whole, not deep down, no matter how appealing some of them were.

I came out the other side of the park and kept going through quiet residential streets. Turning a corner I recognized a house. I had, I realized, rented a room in it for a couple of months. There, on the corner, was the shop where I bought cans of beer and two-for-a-fiver bottles of wine. There was the front garden with a low wall, the one I hid behind from the enraged cabbie I was doing a runner from, while he paced meters away. Between arriving in London and my current existence, there had been a few lives, short-lived, each one sealed off from the next by a slew of burned bridges.