No need to tie himself in knots trying to tie a knot in his tie. Over once, over twice, under and through the over and over, tighten, straighten – job done! Not quite right, start again. Was it better to be tied up or tied down? They sounded like opposites, but they were really the same. He often spotted that, opposites being the same. He hadn’t worn a tie in donkey’s years, but Dr Carr always wore a tie, and he wanted to wear one today to tell him, in person, about getting the job, not that you needed a tie to work in a kitchen; in fact, it would be considered an industrial hazard, dangling in the soup, sweeping the starters aside like an elephant’s trunk, getting caught in the InSinkErator and then dragging you in after it – gobbling you up – or gobbling you down. Same thing. Ties in that sort of workplace didn’t bear thinking about. Health and Safety would go bananas. He wasn’t starting work until next Monday. The owner of the company had lost his son in a mental health tragedy and, in memory of his beloved child, he had created an opportunity for someone who had faced ‘serious mental health challenges’ to have a proper job in a supportive work environment, and Sebastian had aced the interview. The owner had said that he was ‘the best possible candidate’, and now he was dressing up properly to tell Dr Carr, because he felt proud of the work they had done together. Credit where credit was due, Dr Carr was a good man and the best bloody mind reader on the planet. It was literally as if your mind was a book written in Double Dutch and Dr Carr turned out to know Double Dutch, which everyone else thought was pure and utter nonsense. Dr Carr had got him from there to here in a trice. Three times a week for a year was a trice by any standards. ‘An amazing transformation’, that’s what they had called it at the halfway house, halfway between there and here, but also halfway between here and there – not the first there that he had come from, not that again – but the far there on the other side of here from the there he’d started from, and which he hoped he had left behind for ever, after a long journey, a hard slog, a forced march, after the fall of Kabul in the documentary he saw, and a forced march through the Khyber Pass and there was only one survivor, an army doctor who had the honour of being presented to Queen Victoria in person, not on the phone, but in person. Dr Carr said it was very important to come in person. And it definitely helped, especially if you had a history of your mind and body not being in the same place at the same time, like he had. He used to have a really annoying, stupid fucking psychiatrist who said, ‘Where did you go just then?’ when he fell silent. She thought he had ‘wandered off’. She didn’t seem to understand that when his mind wandered off there was no you to say where you had been, because the first you and the second you were not the same and they were not you anyway. Or I, as he would now say. There were seventy-one gender preferences on Facebook, which was a blow for diversity but, as he had said to Dr Carr, he’d had enough diversity to last him a lifetime. What he wanted now was coherence. That had made Dr Carr smile. There might have been a time when he would have wanted to have been called ‘Them and Us’, or ‘Every-Nobody’, or ‘Here It Comes Again’, but now he said ‘I’ when he was talking about himself and answered to ‘you’ when someone addressed him, or ‘he’ or ‘him’ when he was being referred to, or ‘we’ when he was part of a group, or ‘they’ when he was part of a group that the speaker was not part of, or when he was referring to a group that he was not part of. Phew, got there in the end. Grammar was the ground everybody stood on to speak. Even if it was wrong grammar, it could only be wrong because there was right grammar there in the first place. It might sound ordinary not to have a special preference, perhaps boring in other people’s eyes, but for him to be ordinary was a massive victory, like Trafalgar Square. Dr Carr had told him that Sigmund Freud had said that being well was ‘ordinary unhappiness’, which must sound like a bit of a let-down to a lot of people, and not make much sense, because they were pursuing their right to happiness. But that right was really a trick, because they should have been pursuing their right to ordinary unhappiness. It was wrong right, an opposite same. To Sebastian what Sigmund Freud had said made perfect sense. All he’d ever wanted was ordinary unhappiness – being caught in the rain, running out of money before the end of the week, being too shy to talk to the girl without wanting to kill himself; that sort of thing – anything, really, other than extraordinary unhappiness, diabolical torment, cruel and unusual punishment; episodes, one episode after another, bleeding into each other.