‘That you’re not very bright? Or that I think you’re not very bright, and you feel insulted?’

‘Something like that. Sorry.’

‘No,’ says O, still staring at her data.

‘No?’

‘I used different selection criteria for you.’

‘Oh.’

I wait for her to elaborate, but she says nothing for such a long time that I almost fall asleep. I don’t dare ask another question because O doesn’t take well to being ‘hounded’, as she calls it.

‘I selected you because you’re naive. Also a Pollyanna.’

Ooh, that stings. I mean, just because I don’t enjoy enabling men to sexually dismember their business colleagues in dreamspace, that doesn’t mean I’m a Pollyanna. Does it?

‘Take for example this nonsense about Antonio and the contraception. How on earth could you fall for that?’

‘I don’t know. I’m very ashamed. In my defence, he is really, really hot and I was in a vulnerable place.’

‘You’re always in a vulnerable place, darling. Look at how you walk around with those big cow eyes, with that soul-searching way about you. You might as well be carrying a sign that says “Take advantage, I want to be messed with”.’

‘Have you been talking to Shandy?’

‘And you can’t go the rest of your life using Shandy as a stick to beat back people who want to hurt you. So that’s my honest answer, Charlie. I picked you because I thought I could help you. It’s a tough world and you need tough dreams. Now. I would be eternally grateful if you made me a nice cheesy pasta. I need comfort food.’

I feel terrible. ‘But enough about you, O, moaning away over your trip to A and E and demanding painkillers. Let’s talk about me and my existential angst.’

She chuckles. I put water on to boil, get out a lump of cheese, scrape off the dodgy bits and start grating it. ‘Go on, then. Tell.’

‘Only a bad sprain. They gave me Percocet but I don’t want to take it. Bungs me up.’

‘I think you should take it and forget the cheesy pasta, or you really will be bunged up. I’ll make you a salad or something.’

‘Are you my mother?’

‘Did she track your bowel movements?’

O coughs and I hear her shifting herself into the armchair. ‘So I take it you got the client.’

‘She is very interesting. Do you know anything about sleepwalking?’

‘She sleepwalks, too? Is that the problem, or . . . ?’

‘No, the problem is a complex in her dream. It manifests as this horrible murderous dude. I just feel . . . I want to make sure I’m not missing something with the sleepwalking. I don’t know that much about it.’

‘I used to do it when I was small,’ O says. ‘My parents had to put an extra latch on the door up high because one night when I was about four they found me out in the front garden.’

‘Do you remember what it was like?’