This was his stop, his bus stop, or his Carr stop, as he called it. He liked to play with words, which was an improvement on words playing with him, like they used to, like the orcas in the documentary he’d seen, tossing a seal from mouth to mouth amongst the pod, letting it think it might get away, but then catching it again and hurling its bloodstained body through the air, to give it the feeling of despair, he supposed, although David Attenborough said it was practice for the baby orcas, and he was an expert on animals and a national treasure, and so it must be true as well, but Sebastian’s mind had stayed in the seal’s mind and he had to leave the TV room at the halfway house because he couldn’t bear to watch. Some words like ‘nothing’ and ‘vacuum’, and phrases like ‘burning flesh’ and ‘the devil is in the detail’ and ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’, used to drive him mental every time he heard them, which meant that he heard them all the time. Even ‘beyond’ had caused him a lot of grief in its day, but now he had much more control over his reaction to things and he could use those words and phrases, if he needed to. There was no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There! He’d said it and it hadn’t taken him over. ‘Throwing the baby out with the bathwater’: no pro-ble-mo.

He was on Dr Carr’s leafy street now, some of the leaves starting to turn yellow, but still thick and rustling. It made him calm just to be on the street. Whoops, he was fourteen minutes early. Walk to the end of the street and back, like the ads before a favourite programme. He had so much to tell Dr Carr. He hadn’t seen him since Friday. He always had this dam-bursting feeling on Wednesday, with so many things to catch up on. Turn around and walk back slowly. Four minutes. He went down the side of the house and waited by the doorbell. It was all right if he rang a minute early, but when he rang five minutes early, Dr Carr wouldn’t let him in, because he wasn’t ready for him and the session had to be contained.

Dr Carr was standing by the door of his consulting room, as usual, smiling at him warmly.

‘Notice anything different?’ Sebastian asked, before they had even sat down.

‘You tell me,’ said Dr Carr, as he settled into his armchair.

‘The perfect tie,’ said Sebastian, enunciating his words meticulously, ‘is a halfway house between disintegration and strangulation.’ He pointed to the knot he had spent so much care assembling.