He looked at his watch. It was not quite eleven and though he felt exhausted and edgy as he so often did nowadays, he knew sleep was a long way off. He wondered if it would be one of those nights when he would relive past events; when he would fall briefly into a heavy slumber only to wake with a violent jolt a few moments later, hearing again the awful bang and feeling the sickening moment of impact – and then have to face what had happened all over again. Suddenly the dreaded and by now all too familiar physical sensations that had afflicted him since the car crash started to close round him, sucking him into a dark whirlpool. It was a horrible feeling, not initially violent, but rapidly accelerating into a nightmarish panic as he felt his heart start to pound, while a squeezing sensation in his chest made him convinced he would suffocate, the whole accompanied by a deadly nausea. Everything in the room seemed to be closing in on him yet he was incapable of fighting his way out as the walls appeared to tower over him. Breathe, said Christopher, doggedly forcing himself to remain calm, hanging on to this one word, this mantra, as if it were a rope flung to a drowning man. Breathe and count. Breathe in . . . hold . . . breathe out. Breathe in . . . hold . . . breathe out. Concentrate on breathing and you’ll be all right. He lay there willing himself to focus on the slow in . . . out, in . . . out, and after a bit he realised that the black terror was indeed beginning to recede. His hands were less clammy and the walls of the room settling back to their comforting, ordinary safeness. The relief was enormous – but so too was the disappointment that after weeks without it, this physical horror had returned. Though it usually occurred last thing at night, when he was safely in bed, he had a horror that it might overtake him in public and the fear that others should witness his terror had been a constant nightmare in prison. His doctor was confident that the attacks would get better as the memory of the real trauma of being trapped in a crushed car gradually receded, but confessed that he didn’t really know how long it might take.