Clarissa, he could tell, lost a certain admiration that he supposed, well hoped, she had had for him once, maybe, although his work as a lawyer for a hedge fund company, analysing and guaranteeing the legality of certain acquisitions, she had despised from the start. What was legal, she would say, about buying assets, companies, stripping them of everything, people losing jobs, restructuring and selling on. And making more money in the process than the entire wealth of many countries. He had no defence: most of the time his brain could only take in what he had to do at work. The consequence, the conscience aspect of it, he forced himself to ignore. He was becoming increasingly distant, his mind would skip, and his focus would blur, on just about everything but the thing that paid his bills. The money.

Ah, now the woman was stripped of all the creams, and mascara; the lights were dimmed, to make her look worse. Ever thought she looked better. Fresh and definitely younger. Was she the same woman?

He wasn’t very good with faces, Clarissa often accused him of having face blindness, which she called – oh what was it? She used the technical term. He couldn’t recall it right now, as he was questioning whether it was the same woman.

After a few months on his medication, he lost all desire for doing anything, hated his work and talked to his father on the phone every day, to get advice, help, anything really; he didn’t know what to do, but he could no longer turn to Clarissa, who more and more frequently would go to see her parents at weekends. The violinist, Adam, was playing with the Liverpool Philharmonic. But he didn’t know that at the time. Then the big crash happened. The one when they put him inside.

Prosopagnosia, that is what it is, the word for face blindness, that is what Clarissa called it. He was thrilled at his ability to recall the word. And repeated it out loud to the television.

‘Prosopagnosia I have you see, so I don’t know who the hell you are.’

He had to stop the Prozac as all he could think of was killing himself, had a brief return to wanting Clarissa and for a short time he felt she liked him again, but then. Then out of the blue it all went black. The wall came down in front of him, he couldn’t see round it, and it all went black. It was when he came out of the mental institution that she gave him the news that she was pregnant, and he wept with relief that they would now have a child to bond them. But the pregnancy changed Clarissa and he put it down to hormones, like men do, it’s simpler that way. That and periods. It excuses them from thinking that there is any contribution they can make that might be of value.