But now it is Dan who is wrong. People do have power over other people. They always have done, and they always will. He tells others to be brave and have courage, but he is a coward. He can call it shyness if he likes, but the truth is he’s scared. He’s in his own little bell jar, fingers pressed up against the glass.

When Dan was twelve and his friends started talking about girls, Dan was confused, but not embarrassed. Why waste time looking at silly girls when they could be playing Star Wars or armies? It wasn’t until he started staring at the boys while they stared at the girls that he began to worry. At home he’d ponder his weakness for Adam’s apples as his mother sliced fruit for his break-time snack.

She always had textbooks lying around the house. He normally didn’t notice them, but one day she came home with a book called Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson. Dan was thirteen, at that age when he didn’t need to read a book to get the gist of it. This one felt like an omen. It wasn’t normal for boys to want to kiss boys, not in his small town anyway. It was normal for boys to like girls. Dan was already the shortest in the year, and late to the puberty party. He was still without a single armpit hair, while Barry Tanner had bum-fluff above his top lip and was so tall he could rest his elbow on Dan’s shoulder. At school they named Dan after a tiny jockey with a lisp. ‘Hey, Lester Piggott, pass the ball.’ Dan was already on the back foot. Already had to fight to overcome his shyness, his shortness, his self-doubt. Being gay was simply too much to contend with.

And so the die was cast. Dan had chosen normal over happy. Some people have no legs. Dan has no courage, like the lion in The Wizard of Oz. Atticus is Dorothy, wanting to lead him to the Emerald City, but Dan has seen the ending, and he isn’t altogether sure it’s a happy one.

His client leaves feeling worse about herself than she did before she arrived. She’ll go home and tell her diary she isn’t strong enough not to believe them when they call her fat and ugly. She’ll call in sick for the next counselling session and beg her mum not to make her go. Her mother, who wishes her daughter would lose fifteen pounds and get braces, will sigh and tell her she’s not helping herself.