Was it there, for the twelve years that his grandfather grew up as a child, that the seed of insanity was planted and nurtured by his grandfather, unaware, and passed on in a latent genetic form to his son, John Everett Millen, who then started to show the signs of mental disturbance, and then these seeds grew in the semen, his semen, forming the DNA that was passed on to Ever in innocence having been absorbed through environment? Mental imbalance starting as environmental and ending up as internal and naturalised – nature’s process. Who knows if the grandmother had intercourse with any of the inmates and a male microchimerism effect took place, harbouring the DNA from her sexual partners and passing on mental imbalance.

It had definitely found its way in as a consistent gene.

Ever had not taken his own mental condition into account, in terms of not allowing it to determine, initially, his life – not that he was completely crazy or anything, at least that was what he thought in his more positive moments.

*

Ever was now thirty.

He had had a complete crash into the wall three years previously and had since been on what doctors like to describe as a long-term low dosage of antidepressants.

A 25 mg tablet split in half, finally settling on Lustral as his pill of choice, after a disastrous experience on Prozac. Lustral was the UK brand or in the US it was called Zoloft, but they both contained the same compound – sertraline.

A selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, more familiarly known as an SSRI. Ever knew that in treatment of the brain, it had the sophistication and equivalence of using a sledgehammer, but doctors love prescribing it, it gets you out of their office and back on to some kind of road to recovery, and anyway they know very little about what goes on in the brain. Like faces, brains are all different, but all are treated the same. And they are able, the doctors, to pat themselves on their pinstriped backs and console themselves that the SSRI is supposed to be a major advancement on the earlier model, the tricyclic antidepressant, like amitriptyline, which Ever had also been put on at one point, and which he likened to LSD, an even earlier attempt at hammering the brain into some kind of submission to enter an alternative world.

Ever loved these, the Amys, as he called them, and kept them for purely recreational purposes – for when you just didn’t want to think of anything at all.

Just float, with a little shake in the hands, being, as far as he could see, and there was no one to tell him otherwise, the only downside.

Whether the brain ever truly gets any of these chemicals out of its smudge mass is questionable, but it’s not a very long life one has, and on the basis that everyone has something, maybe they’re not too bothered.