‘It might help you. The breathlessness is obviously becoming a problem or you wouldn’t have come to see me. Have you talked to anyone about how you’re feeling – friends, family?’

Kate shook her head. Her dad was dead and her mother was a fragile creature who quivered at the sound of raised voices, cried at donkey rescue adverts and hadn’t watched the news in over twenty years. Kate had friends, of course she did, but they were either hugely successful in their fields or happily ensconced in yummy mummy land, being puked on by babies or drawn on by toddlers or whatever it was they did all day. As far as they were concerned she was doing well and she wasn’t about to correct them. She’d always prided herself on being independent and self-sufficient. And anyway, she wasn’t the problem. Her lack of dick was.

She left the doctor’s office feeling irritated. She didn’t have time for mindfulness and all that crap. What she wanted, needed, was a quick fix to her problem. A pill she could pop whenever she felt like there was a lead weight pressing down on her chest. There was wine, that always made her feel more relaxed, but she couldn’t be on top of her game if she spent every evening half cut. She Googled for solutions when she returned home and ended up finding her way to a page about somatic symptom disorder. And that led her to Tom’s Facebook group. She laughed when she read the description of his psychosomatic illness. What kind of utter basket case did you have to be for half your body to go numb when you weren’t even ill? She rummaged in her handbag for her Ventolin, took two puffs and continued reading. The comments from the other people in the group were ridiculously effusive:

Tom has changed my life

I can’t thank Tom enough. He’s a miracle worker.

I was so fed up of being ill I considered taking my own life but my mum convinced me to go to Tom’s group and now I can’t believe I ever thought that way.

I feel like a new person. I’d be lost without this group.

It was like the second-coming, the way they exalted him. He was obviously a charlatan. Kate had watched enough YouTube clips of US preachers getting the wheelchair-bound walking and blind people seeing to know that all you needed to miraculously cure people was a charismatic and powerful personality, high expectations, a frenzied atmosphere and the power of suggestion. It was basically mass hypnosis and she was pretty sure Tom Wade knew all about that. The next group meeting was a Saturday lunchtime. She’d go along, she decided, for a laugh, if nothing else. And then her whole world was flipped on its head.