Turning, I saw the cockatoo again. It was in the oily branches of the neighbour’s tree, shocking white through the sooted glass, lazily stretching out its wings, letting me know that it had been there a while, watching. Watching this whole time.

You can’t just drop an unbelievable detail into an otherwise straightforward profile. It jolts the reader, jolts them out of the belief that you are a faithful conduit of the truth about the subject. If something unbelievable presents itself – the noted barrister used to be a shark-wrangler and is missing two toes from her right foot as a consequence; the acclaimed author is a fabulist who invented the meat of his bestselling non-fiction book; the promising journalist is a secret drunk who has padded a dozen recent interviews with recycled material and is being stalked by a vengeful cockatoo – you must take the reader’s side in their disbelief. Confirm. Ensure you heard correctly. Ask for corroborating evidence and explanatory background. And account for the reader’s likely reaction in the text itself: ‘Unbelievable as it might sound …’

The cockatoo sounds unbelievable, I know. I have to account for it. For a second, long enough for the wet, heavy can to slip through my wet fingers and fall to the tiled floor, producing a spume of foam, I thought I saw the bird. Then I saw the truth: it was a plastic bag, caught in the branches of the tree over the back garden, exactly the same bag on the same branch as produced the same shock yesterday morning. Yesterday, on the bridge, it had been a pigeon, nothing more exotic than that. On the train – well, I don’t know what that was, a line of reflective stripes in the darkness perhaps, but I do know that it was not a posse of malign avians. There is no cockatoo and there never was. I know. But every now and then, for a moment … I have to describe it as I see it, whatever it is, a mild hallucination, a recurring perceptual glitch, an outward manifestation of a kink in the psyche.

This particular kink isn’t even discreet enough to be properly repressed. I know exactly what it refers to. It’s so transparent it’s embarrassing.

It relates to a lie I told. Not ‘my first’ lie. Who remembers their first, anyway? Little children have elastic standards of truth: to say something is to make it so, because the past disappears so quickly for them and the future is impossible to imagine. All that matters is the eternal present, in which – literal hand-in-the-biscuit-barrel stuff aside – the lie is the only thing that is real, and is therefore the only thing that can be considered true. Many little children are natural moral philosophers with bright careers ahead in politics, public relations and marketing.