L. BASCOMBE: If you like. When a historical injustice passes without serious consequences for the perpetrators, the victims are unable to heal. They remain stuck in a situation where the weight of their trauma prevents them from moving on. Perpetrators of the worst atrocities in history have the ability to move on very quickly from what they did. They might feel some superficial remorse, but it doesn’t stop them from succeeding.

ME: Like the Germans after World War II? You have German ancestry, don’t you?

L. BASCOMBE: Victims are retraumatised by having to witness their former oppressors flourishing like the green bay tree. This acts as a barrier to their ability to succeed. That is what is happening with you and John Coetzee. That’s why you are the way you are.

ME: There is only one flaw in that theory. John Coetzee is not my oppressor. He isn’t the person who raped me. He just wrote a book about it.

L. BASCOMBE: He was a secondary perpetrator. His book and its success had the effect of inflicting secondary trauma on you. You can’t deny that.

ME: No.

L. BASCOMBE: You should have launched that social media campaign. You could still do so. It would be healing for you to see him brought low. Only then would you be able to pull yourself out of your tuna-and-tinned-peaches existence.

ME: I didn’t know that therapists advocated revenge as a tool of healing.

L. BASCOMBE: Perhaps they don’t, but you have never been able to distinguish between what I really say and what I say in your imagination, have you?

* * *

I leave her office in a state of bewilderment.

Fantasy and reality are conflating in my mind. I can’t remember what Lydia Bascombe said. I know we talked about the idea of a social media campaign, but there was another conversation going on inside my head, and now I can’t distinguish it from the real one. Have I confided in her about the precise extent of my delusions? Would she have me committed if I did?

I get home and burrow under my crocheted blanket. It shows a tendency to unravel in places, but not in as many places as my mind is unravelling.

A knock at the door lifts me groaning from my armchair. Phones and doorbells. Doorbells and phones. I can’t decide which I hate more.

I open the door to find a small child standing outside. It is a boy in quaint clothing—knickerbockers and a button-down shirt. They are not clothes from another era, but the kind of branded throwback items that hipster parents pay a fortune for. When Eugene has children, he will dress them like this.

“Can I help you?” He must have thrown a ball over the wall into the hardscrabble patch of weeds on the side of my rented house.

“I need to talk to you. May I come in?”