Words have genuine power. We curse and bless ourselves with the words we use. My father, whose mantra was ‘I can’t stand’… busybody neighbours, January, chuggers, tomatoes, the council, clothes with logos, multi-storey car parks… gave out at the knees. Was in a wheelchair at fifty-two. Never understood why he was hobbled while his boss was ten years older and still playing squash. Now it seems obvious. He cursed himself. Said, ‘I can’t stand’, until it was true. Committed, on himself, a slow but powerful magic.

Unconsciously, we are casting spells on ourselves. My father didn’t know that he’d done so, because such spells work slowly. And because he thinks knees are just physical things, that their cartilage degrades from use, and not because they’re listening to what we say. Yet, why shouldn’t our bodies respond to our thoughts? The placebo effect is well enough known that every pharmaceutical trial must subtract its power from their figures. If a belief can make us better, it can make us worse. And if you say to yourself, ‘I can’t stand, I can’t stand, I can’t stand’, does that not, to the body, sound like a belief it should obediently render into truth?

It was there in my training. The psychology of authority. A doctor’s prognosis can be fatal. A parent’s too. The child, told he is evil, will become so. Isn’t this just what happened to April? Programmed to feel worthless. Her mother’s loathing explained by the child to herself as ‘I must be loathsome’, and this signal transmitted to the boys who responded with such contempt. Does it make it her fault she was raped? Or her mother’s? No. For all of this is unconscious. We transmit our damage to others unconsciously. Repeat it to ourselves unconsciously. You could no more condemn April for her rape than condemn her for her nightmares. We are a species asleep. A race of powerful magicians who turn ourselves and each other into frogs and toads, unaware of our power, believing we are victims of circumstance.

There is pleasure in ordinary things: in the thoughtless sensuousness of the washing up, which he prefers now to loading the dishwasher, though Jules despairs. Doesn’t understand why you would want to do that, when we have a perfectly good dishwasher. Another symptom of his new strangeness; another reason not to trust. She doesn’t understand how he could love it, this thing she has labelled a chore. And he excuses her from understanding; doesn’t try to explain something she can’t imagine. But he loves it at night, especially, when the window over the sink shows a ghost of him blending into their corner of the forest, gloved hands in warm water, fishing things from the depths.