They being medical folk, who we seem to trust with a stupidity that always struck Ever as profound. Just numb the fucker, minimise his neurotic options and stop him moaning. No one can cope with the depressed moaning of a manic depressive, a bipolar, a chronic depressive, a general anxiety-ridden human.

Take your pick, and those are the mild ones.

Options, that’s what you want.

Ever had tried every day in his attempt to cut down on his dosage, he didn’t want to be drug-dependent, not pharmaceutically drug-dependent, at any rate, but it didn’t work, and his inertia and anxiety became so intense it was impossible for him to do his work.

It had all started out of the blue, with an uncontrollable bout of crying, extraordinary fear that everything was going to go wrong in his life. And he ended up being taken by his wife to a pinstripe and sat in the corner of this psychiatrist’s office, or consulting room, as they like to call them, lying in a heap, in a heap of tears, on the floor in the corner, with this man pronouncing in a way that he has since found all doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists, even psychoanalysts, to have, pronouncing with a coldness and detachment and a pomposity that they assume must be helpful to either themselves or to the poor beast of a patient, in that it keeps the objectivity in place, but it is shit. Because all that comes across is a feeling of, that word again, not fucking caring.

Caring being the word, not fucking.

Nothing seemed anything other than black.

No road out, they put him in an institution and filled him with a mind-numbing drug, thioridazine, now banned because it has a habit of causing slow, repetitive, purposeless, involuntary movements on a permanent basis. It was banned in 2005, so technically he should never have been given it, they probably had some left over, but what a one to be put on – that, Valium and sertraline all at the same time.

But the first drug they used, for its sedation properties, was trazodone, which is an antidepressant of the SARI class, a serotonin antagonist and reuptake inhibitor, a hypnotic, delivering a sleep-inducing and antidepressant effect. It makes it difficult to stand, as dizziness is a major side effect, but the one thing that does stand up, with a 1 in 6,000 chance, is your penis – the rare side effect of priapism.

So there was Ever, the odds against him, with a permanent erection that delivered no pleasure, unable to be relieved by ejaculation, ultimately supplying nothing but pain. Desire, strangely, was not aligned to the physical condition. There was no desire to penetrate. So that medication was eliminated; this is why they must have dug out the thioridazine, which just numbs you and droops you into an entirely different condition. Numb nuts.

Maybe should have gone for the ECT.