The session had already started and so Martin sat in his usual chair, holding his patient in mind, giving him the security of a dependable concern, even when there was no obvious way for Sebastian to appreciate it. If he did show up, Sebastian would find his therapist imperturbably keeping their session going. To Sebastian, at some level, Martin’s dependability was like discovering that a torturer was still waiting for him in his prison cell, and yet, at another level, one of the things infiltrating Sebastian’s mind was the regular rhythm, the rocking cradle of their three weekly sessions. Just because there was an eruption of unconscious material constantly bursting into Sebastian’s consciousness didn’t mean that he was able to understand its meaning; his mind was more like the ‘darkness visible’ of Milton’s hell. Sebastian had encrypted his secrets, using a system he had taken the further precaution of not knowing how to decipher. That way, if he were tortured, he could honestly say that he had no idea what the secret was. Patience was paramount; if too many delusions were removed too rapidly, he might feel too threatened to continue the work and Martin might lose him. How delusional he was being was sometimes hard to tell. When Sebastian had come in claiming that Satan had followed him from the bus stop, Martin treated the news at face value, saying how worrying that must have felt, and asking if this had ever happened before, but he was clear in his own mind that he was dealing with a fantasy. Outside the most extreme cases, though, it was important to keep an open mind, however strongly his experience pulled him towards one interpretation or another. Quite apart from the issue of data protection, and the reluctance or inefficiency that made it hard to get medical notes and detailed biographies, Martin was a psychoanalyst who preferred not to read prejudicial material about his patients, but to deal immediately and directly with the facts, in so far as they could be established, and the symbolic language that emerged from the sessions themselves. Sebastian had been referred to him at the clinic simply as Sebastian Tanner, a man of thirty-four, who had first been admitted to psychiatric hospital fifteen years before, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and had suffered from recurring episodes ever since.

When the basement doorbell finally rang, Martin buzzed Sebastian in and opened the inner door to his consulting room to welcome his patient. Sebastian often stopped in the bathroom to delay his arrival and only emerged with a few minutes of the session left, but on this occasion, he stormed down the corridor, swept past Martin and marched straight up to the garden door.

‘You fucking lied to me!’ he said. ‘The cow jumped over the moon long before Armstrong landed on it. One giant – stepping on mankind.’

‘Really?’ said Martin. ‘How did the cow do that?’