Yes, but he makes it bigger than that. He says – you, for example, doctors – that you kill your patients with a prognosis. That telling someone they have six weeks to live is no different from witch-doctoring. It’s a voodoo curse.

The locum stares at the wall, which is covered in information charts with pastel-coloured boxes. He is thinking of something.

I just think he’s going a bit crazy, she says.

The locum comes back to her.

You think he needs to be assessed?

Oh no, no… but she is hesitant. Does he?

Does your husband suffer from depression?

Yes, she says, he does. Well, he did. I mean, he’s not seemed depressed the last couple of months, but before that, yes, very.

Is he under medical supervision?

Oh no! she laughs. He’s terrified of doctors. He is one, you know. Not a GP. A psychologist.

The locum is looking at her very carefully, as if he is palpating her with his eyes.

But recently, he’s been better?

Better, as in not depressed, yet. But he’s weird.

Manic?

No. I don’t think so.

You don’t think he’d come in?

He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with him. Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with him. This is going nowhere. And the doctor seems more interested in her husband than in her. So what about my headaches? Can’t you just give me something? A pill or something?

Later, with another headache coming on despite her new prescription – do these young doctors even know what they are doing? – she finds her husband making dinner. She can’t get used to him making dinner. And he is so slow with it, as though every ingredient needs special consideration, and isn’t just an onion, or a carrot, or a lump of tenderloin, but a personal friend. Today he is – again! – making something vegetarian, not that they have to convert, he says, but he feels more comfortable handling foodstuffs of a slower consciousness. He has told her that everything is conscious – everything! Even stones. I mean, plants, fair enough, even she remembers reading somewhere about plants hooked up to electrodes reacting violently to someone who has just mowed the lawn. But stones? Perhaps she should have mentioned that to the doctor.

She’s so cross about eating pulses again, and so ratty with the oncoming headache (which the doctor has hinted is probably her husband’s fault), that she decides to have it out with him.

You explain to me, she says with a large glass of Pinot in her hand, you explain to me how child abuse victims have created their own reality. Are you telling me on some level they want to be abused? That they are asking for it?

He is stirring his damn pulses.