Michael Davies drank Scotch. Near misses always hit him hard. Beth told him forty-five times thirty-seven was one thousand six hundred sixty-five not one thousand four hundred eighty. Michael told her sums were for weak and unoriginal minds.

“Numerophobia,” said Beth.

“Will you fuck off with this?” asked Michael. He thought Beth made these phobias up.

762

Frankburg asked the sound engineer for a glass of water. Memories of the Boston conference made his mouth dry and his larynx contract. He had turned up to see his astonishingly beautiful admirer, Clara Redlake, at the conference’s opening dinner, hair shining in the evening sunset, back-lit by the lights of Boston Harbor, laughing politely at a bon mot from an erect delegate, and he had faked tonsillitis to cover his unmastered Welsh.

Hoarsely introducing himself as the man behind You Too Can Fly, he apologized for his rasping voice but said that it was a pleasure to finally meet.

Clara Redlake, brushing his apologies aside, had been full of admiration that he’d struggled to Boston at all. Dr. Frankburg had told her he was sure his lost voice made him a better listener and made a joke that all therapists should lose their voices once in a while. Clara had laughed.

He’d spent a charming evening in the company of a woman who was not only full of sympathy for his condition but said it added an even more exciting level of anticipation for when it was back to its full strength. He’d said, “Too kind,” but thought the condition was probably going to last for at least a couple of days, certainly for the duration of the conference.

“But what about the paper you are to deliver?” she’d said.

Dr. Frankburg had forgotten about that.

761

At that same conference a woman called Ali Bronski had talked her way past security by claiming to be a case study. That was why she’d misplaced her identity card. She said she was schizophrenic and she’d helped herself to vol-au-vents and cava.

760

“Yes, the paper,” Frankburg had choked. “Will you excuse me?”

He’d grabbed a brandy from the drinks tray and run to the toilets.

Inside a cubicle he ordered his thoughts.

“Five Miles High: Alienation and Isolation Amongst the Jet Set” was the keynote address; it was ready, honed, it was his finest work, his coup de grace. And he had a point to prove. It was a room full of analysts, stuck-up Freudians, many of whom found Frankburg’s brand of cognitive behavioral therapy a bit quack and told him so to his face now and then.

A bad throat was going to come across as an attack of nerves dealt with in a very schoolboy fashion.

Then he’d heard a cough from the next cubicle. A female cough.

“Hello?” Dr. Frankburg said.

“Hello.”

“Sorry, am I in the ladies’?”

“Unless I’m in the gents’.”

“How do we find out?”

“We look at the sign on the door.”

759