She looks at me for the first time since she arrived, giving a tiny shake of the head. She and I have talked about this a hundred times. She may be brusque, borderline rude at times, but I’ve always known I’m in the very best of hands with her. In private, she’s dismissed her predecessors on my case as ‘drug dealers’ – doctors who are far too keen to settle on a quick diagnosis before throwing a fistful of prescriptions at the problem. ‘You’ll leave here well,’ she’s often said, ‘not as a drug addict.’

The trouble is, I do have what they term a genetic disposition to schizophrenia. Mum has battled with it for fifteen years. But Dr Gale is adamant my condition is something else.

‘For close to a year,’ she says, ‘Oliver was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress syndrome following a car accident in which a close family friend was killed.’ Her eyes drill into Gramps and Silver Foxton in turn.

Gramps stares at the floor. Foxton looks at me with a pained expression.

‘While Oliver was what we might consider high functioning, given his condition,’ she snaps, ‘how anybody could ignore the symptoms, I have no idea. A lack of due diligence at very least, I’d suggest.’

Gramps’s head tips forward until his chin is touching his collarbone.

‘PTSD,’ Dr Obisanya murmurs, nodding his head. ‘Psychosis brought on by severe PTSD. It’s not uncommon. Delusions, hallucinations. You’d smell things, Oliver? Hear voices, see things?’

‘Yeah,’ I tell him. I say it like it’s just plain fact. I’ve told too many people now. I can’t be bothered to make excuses for myself any more.

‘It is very similar to paranoid schizophrenia in how it presents,’ he says. ‘But, of course, something entirely different.’

Dr Gale has always maintained that a diagnosis of PTSD is much better news for me than if I was suffering from schizophrenia. She’s explained that, once I’ve fully dealt with the cause of the trauma, there’s a good chance that I’ll be able to get by with little or no medication long term. This’s why I spend an hour twice a week with Anka. We talk through the accident in minute detail each time we meet. At first, I’d have to break off every few minutes, sometimes because I couldn’t breathe, sometimes because a flashback would assault me from nowhere. But, as the weeks have worn on, it feels like I’ve found a slot in my brain into which the whole thing can be filed. Now, when we talk about it, I just find one or two more details and I add them to that file. It might sound simple – obvious even – but, if someone had helped me do just that a year ago, none of this would ever have happened.