Dan’s would be startlingly blank. It has never bothered him before. Exploring his sexuality always seemed too exposing. A minefield of potential embarrassment, revealing his inexperience. Dan was happy to stay celibate. Now he wishes he’d smiled back at some of the men who’d nodded at him. Tried talking to one in a club. Fumbled in the corner of a darkened cloakroom with a stranger he’d never see again. Anything. His naivety seems pathetic now. Atticus exudes carnal knowledge and, in comparison, Dan feels like a badgeless Boy Scout.

As a child, being chronically shy was hard enough, especially when he spent some time around his naturally gregarious cousin, Luke. Then came his obsessive disorder. Dan always preferred lining up the Star Wars characters neatly as opposed to playing with them. Luke would laugh as he knocked over Dan’s figurines, but Dan knew from a young age that he was always going to struggle not to tidy up the world. He always wanted to tell strangers if their coat was buttoned up wrongly, or if their scarf didn’t lie just so, but his shyness stopped him. So it made him anxious instead. Dan had had enough to contend with, without realizing he liked boys. He didn’t want to. Didn’t want the limelight, the stress. There was no bad experience: he just wanted his life to be easier. He didn’t want to spot the cracks in the pavement, didn’t want to have to pull the rug tassels straight before he could walk over them, and he didn’t want to be gay.

Dan has worked hard on the shyness. Now he’s quite friendly, even if he does say so himself. But afterwards, how he checks himself. Rewinds it all. Did he stand too close? Did he stay too long? Did he smell okay? Were they desperate to leave?

He is not shy at work, where his patients pay him to analyse them in the way he normally analyses himself. He knows they want to spend another fifty minutes with him because they book another session at the end of the last one. Dan feels crisp and clean at work, efficient as a freshly emptied Hoover.

He did, that is. Until Atticus.

‘Tell me more about Tracey Emin,’ Dan says. ‘Tell me everything.’

And that is how the rest of the session goes, with Atticus’s feet up on the couch, ankles crossed, and Dan’s head tipped back to receive his words, his plummy voice.

When the clock ends their session and Atticus is halfway out of the door, Dan says, ‘Is this helping?’

And Atticus says, ‘Yes,’ so quietly Dan isn’t sure he said it at all.

Lizzie

(Give peas a chance)

LIZZIE IS CLEANING/HIDING in the kitchen again when Tess comes to find her.

‘Ah, there she is. Morning. How are you today, Lizzie?’