But he had no scar on his head, well, only the one he got playing rugby from a kick in the head that produced a concussion, and he couldn’t remember anything for a few days afterwards.

Oh God no, come on. Ridiculous. Agency and ownership.

Ever was not the best to contradict this argument as he never really thought he inhabited his own body and was not in control of it. An excuse, oh Ever, as ever.

Ever had explored this phenomenon with the use of ketamine, for a short time: a drug that really induces the idea of one’s limbs not being one’s own. But that had never produced a surprise in Ever. He felt completely at home with that feeling, it wasn’t alien to him, just normal. Ketamine ultimately altered no state of his: it was a short-lived experiment.

It was a pretty good reason for the mood swings, though, the chronic sleep thing and the question of ownership due to possible interference of the temporal lobes. But it was something he refused to consider; in the daylight hours anyway.

The creeping obsessive compulsive disorder, however, he kept to himself, the whole time, no one has ever known; therapist; psychiatrist; any of the jumble. No one was any the wiser as to how many times he had to turn lights off or open and close doors or touch things to the count of whatever was comfortable, which would then would allow the release of the touch.

Of course, there was no point, beyond earning money, in his world; maybe he just knew that and it was as simple as that. Maybe he had given up. She tried to educate him in sleep discipline, even sent him for three days to a sleep clinic, but he just kept taking the pills, to force himself through the night to enable getting up early to be at work by 7.30 – when the first deals that he would be overseeing would come through.

Deals from the far east, Tokyo: he would always contact his father at this time, in Los Angeles, and they would chat or email, his father being a night owl, or just a non-sleeper. He always felt the need to communicate with him, every day. The closeness he felt towards his father was unlike anything else he felt, or anything he had felt with anyone else. As the time zone swept west and made the London hours appropriate, he dealt with Russia and Africa. Acquisitions that he had to go through in exhausting detail to make sure no illegalities were taking place. Ruthless business practice did not count as an illegality, and the job wore down even his limited social conscience.