Or at least purchase an old car and keep the rental, if Lomita was still going to be in his life. He could buy a car, he had a ten-day period to transfer the title, but could give a false name, never do the transfer and then the car would be untraceable to him. He had in his mind a thing that he wanted to do, that would carry too much shame to tell anyone, even to acknowledge to himself. And he needed the shame car to be able to do that thing and then he could just be rid of it. Drive it to a waste patch in Koreatown or the like, and with no record of ownership coming back to him, he would be able to just dump it. And with it hopefully the shame and the guilt.

But probably never that, with his brain, they would both stay with him.

He just hadn’t worked out whether what he had decided to do would make him feel better about his father. He was worried about the state of his brain, he could feel the anxiety and the pressure and the dark; that feeling of doing the extreme without caring about consequence.

*

As was once said of him at school by his housemaster.

This boy has no moral compass. How the housemaster knew at the age of fifteen had always been a mystery to Ever. But in his own way, though not a bad person, Ever understood what he meant; he had no stop buttons, no censorship for when he wanted to do something. He put his head down and did it. Consequences later. He remembered the time when he had to change his modus, whether conscious or not. He was still small for his age, with constant bouts of illness, and was bullied endlessly – then during one episode of being beaten up by the same lumpen idiot, he decided to pick up a broom and swing it wildly round and round, screaming that he had gone completely insane. Making contact with the broom on the side of the bully’s head, severely damaging his eye socket, something he was not proud of. But from that moment he was known as a crazy guy, the boys started to leave him alone; one or two more manic screaming fits were needed, at certain times, to solidify this new persona, and it proved to be a successful self-protection process.

This crazy guy persona, at school in England, got him promoted from the Fourth XV at rugby to the First XV as he employed this same degree of mania on the pitch, and that too proved to be a success. Head down and go.

Reputation seemed to be all.