Will feels faint as he tries to catch his breath. He’s in the yard outside the Smugglers kitchens. Black sacks of food waste are heaped in one corner, split and oozing scraps on to the muddy ground, the fat tail of a rat poking from beneath the pile. The head chef and a commis are smoking with Mick Touch in front of a wall where a running tally of their football match results on quiet shifts is written in chalk. On several occasions, as the skinniest member of the kitchen team, Will has been sent down that passageway to retrieve their sponge ball.

‘I’m sure there’s some guests in the bar who’d like their shoes cleaned,’ the chef says. ‘Heard you do a good job.’

‘Easy now,’ Mick Touch says. ‘Then again, these old brogues could do with a shine up.’ He looks at his own feet in turn. ‘How’s about it, Willy boy?’

The three of them roar with laughter.

‘Fucking pussy,’ snorts the shaven-headed commis chef, who Will hasn’t met before.

‘What you doing coming in by the tradesman’s entrance, anyway?’ Mick asks.

Will leans forward, dizzy all of a sudden.

‘Will?’ Mick says. ‘Willy boy?’

Will stumbles and grabs at Mick’s arm to steady himself.

‘White as a sheet,’ the chef says.

Mick puts an arm round Will, lowering him till he’s sitting against the wall. ‘Go and have a word at the bar, would you?’ he says to the commis. ‘This man needs a brandy.’

In

For someone who thinks he must surely be quite unwell, Will Parks is surprised by how curiously alive he feels. Alarmingly alive, even. That could, of course, all be part of the condition, Will now realizes.

He cups a hand round the screen of his iPhone so no one in this morning’s assembly can sneak a look, and searches for ailments that cause an excess of energy and upbeat mood. Having been wide awake at six a.m., and out of the door for a bracing Beppo walk along the beach soon after, he adds ‘reduced need for sleep’ to the list.

At the front, deputy head Ms Rizzo addresses the lower sixth, but after the events of yesterday afternoon Will has far too much on his mind to be paying her attention.

Hypomania, his phone suggests. Commonplace, it seems. From this morning’s googling on the bus, he had reckoned that epilepsy was the most likely cause of the recent strangeness.

Will shoves his phone into his pocket and massages his temples, bored with staring at one website after another in an attempt to self-diagnose. Somebody to talk to, that’s what he really needs. The opinion of someone who won’t laugh him off.