The dregs of the daytime drinkers are nearing their personal closing times. A pink-permed squawker, who might have been someone’s kindly grandmother but for the men who disappointed her beyond fertility, is attempting to bicker with someone she calls Fre-ed at the opposite end of the bar. Perched like an unstable parrot on her bar stool, she throws verbal peanut shells in his direction. Fred, of whom little is visible but a monkish bald patch, has imploded in his tracksuit: caved inwards from the muffled explosion of some ancient booby trap, whose fuse was unwittingly lit by a spark from the squawker’s flinty beak. Your kind of place. No surprise that Tom would choose a pub as his father’s kind of place, having heard his rants against the ubiquitous noodle and sushi bars, the corporate coffee hangouts, the shot cellars and vodkaries. But this place? This slice of late twentieth-century soap opera set? Logan returns to his notes.

Consider possible effect on AS. Pros and cons of assisting her to disconnect from religion. Pros. Help with assessment as temporarily psychotic? Motivation to communicate? Cons. Danger of her re-engaging with reality, potential traumatic impact. Danger of making her ‘normal’ before trial. Possible difficulty of gaining consent.

He wonders if Dr Salmon might have better luck in this regard. Not only as a woman – for he senses in April a particular hostility towards men – but as one who has undergone the process herself and might tempt April with an experience he has not a hope of describing with any conviction.

Consider GS. Too left-field? Can legal team be persuaded? What about the mother?

A shaven-headed youth is feeding his universal credit to the slot machine. Suited men are supping quiet beers before boarding trains to even quieter lives in Burgess Hill and Haywards Heath. He is none of these people. He is barely the same species. Though there are superficial similarities, he is no more them than chimps – with their binocular gaze, opposable thumbs and hairless palms – are men. For there’s something around Logan, an absence, a hole in the air that contains him, as though he’s an astral traveller, a complex arrangement of atoms only temporarily projected there. And he realizes, not for the first time, that everything has become unreal: not just the fake horse brasses pimping the faux beams but the barman’s moustache, the inscrutable symbols on the beer mats, the depiction of car-crushed limbs on a drink-drive poster, the laugh of the parrot lady, the pinstripes on a man’s tie. Nothing is real. Nausea rears in his stomach, an overwhelming loss and detachment, as if nothing, nothing—

Daddy.

Flora.

Daddy. Are you feeling all right?

Not really, no.

He knows she’s not real. She’s not the adult Flora. She’s the pigtailed nine-year-old, the one who watched him vomit pistachio ice-cream before he knew he was allergic.

She has an angel’s name.

Who?

The angel Gabrielle.