‘Now you’re buttering me up. Topped and tailed and buttered up. A dish fit for a king. My mum would be proud.’

Sebastian moved back to the chair. He looked at Martin with a strange mixture of suspicion and yearning.

‘So, I said to Simon,’ he resumed, ‘“No, don’t you get it? Everyone thinks it’s the cameras and the smoke detectors and the people on television that are watching you …” “Well, the frigging cameras are watching you, aren’t they?” said Simon. And I said, “Yeah, but it’s the mirrors that are really watching you! When you look into a mirror, it sucks you in so you can look at yourself and then you get trapped behind it.” Simon got angry and said I was a paranoid wanker and I was doing his head in and he left me on my own.’

Sebastian suddenly grew furious.

‘How do you think that made me feel, Dr Emotions? You’re supposed to be the fucking expert. I was abandoned in the middle of a crowd, in the middle of my first episode by my so-called best friend, so I felt abandoned, didn’t I? Fuckwit.’

‘We don’t know how you feel until you tell us,’ said Martin calmly. ‘You might have felt sad, or frightened, or angry, or indifferent, or relieved.’

‘I did feel relieved, that’s right,’ said Sebastian, suddenly eager to agree. ‘I felt that if he couldn’t understand, I was better off without him. He was holding me back when I was seeing something really important, really deep.’

‘About the mirror?’ asked Martin.

‘Yeah, I realised that the whole sky was a mirror, the ultimate mirror, like a silver dish cover, keeping us warm until Death makes a meal of us. I knew I was the last one who wasn’t under its control, and so I concentrated and sent a blue beam from my forehead into the sky to shatter it, but the mirror sent a yellow beam down from the sky to push the blue beam back into my head and make it melt down. I used all my concentration and after a massive struggle, I managed to shatter the sky and it rained down bits of mirror all over London. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I could feel that all the mirrors in the city had gone black, and that I’d set everybody free.’

‘You must have felt very powerful,’ said Martin.