‘No problemo,’ he said to the mirror, like Arnie in Terminator. ‘No pro-ble-mo.’

He had tied the knot. Job done! It was looking as if it wouldn’t fall apart, or strangle him, which was another way of saying perfect. Dr Carr would be amazed. ‘The perfect tie is a halfway house between disintegration and strangulation,’ that’s what he was going to say, like Oscar Wilde, or Jeeves, or someone like that. He’d been planning it for a while. Not everyone would get it, so he was keeping his made-up quotation for Dr Carr. He was much better now – ‘an amazing transformation’ – but he still had to be careful not to talk too much, not to be too cheerful or over-familiar, not to plunge in at the deep end. He was so relieved to have ordinary unhappiness that sometimes he wanted to tell the whole world, like someone in a musical who stands up and starts singing to the whole bus. If you weren’t in a musical, though, instead of singing along, the other passengers would probably call the police. And what you had to keep a firm handle on was that you were not in a musical (unless you were in a musical).