‘I can see it all. I can hear it. I can feel the hard edges of the toy tractor I was pushing about the room. Then I can hear a car on the street. Mam saw, and knew it was Dad. She burst into the room, grabbed us hard by the wrists and dragged us to her own car parked up the alleyway around the back of their flat, then went back. We could hear shouting coming from inside. It was late, dark out. We were in the car. I’d told Mum we wouldn’t get out, no matter what. The door slammed open at the back of the flat. Mam was there screaming.’ He pauses, recalling that time. ‘She was just screaming and screaming and— ’ he frowns deep now, his eyes almost closed ‘— I don’t know what happened in between. I don’t even think I saw Dad. I only saw Mum with blood all over her and she kept saying his name – she was screaming. Then we were speeding away from the house. And Dad was outside and there was even more blood on him and he was just watching the car and I was watching him out the back window, which, if you want a metaphor, you’re unlikely to find a more apt one. Dad red-handed, Mum stealing us away from him. I was still young and now I know that you don’t form real memories until you’re seven or eight so I don’t know how much of it is my memory and how much is images stored from the nightmares I have about it.’

I wince internally, beginning to realise how complex Cormac’s issues are. We inherit all sorts of traits from our parents. I always wanted to please my own father; that’s why I ended up as a psychologist – to impress him, I suppose. Psychologists always have trouble understanding themselves – psychologists see other psychologists for this very reason. I’ve had patients who were practicing psychologists who failed to see how events in their childhood shaped them as adults. It’s a professional blind spot.

‘Do you think your mother changed then? Was she different afterwards?’

I’m losing him now. I can see the vagueness in his eyes. Very intelligent people often intellectualise their emotions. They speak about them like they’re happening to someone else. They displace their feelings with thought and logic. He smiles. ‘I think when you see something like that, it will change anyone.’

‘And your father, where is he now?’

‘When he was done killing my grandparents, he ah— ’ a pause, his eyes seem to shine for a moment. ‘Well he turned the knife on himself.’

But he survived, otherwise the article would have made it clear he was dead, and not in custody.

‘But he’s alive?’

‘If you can call it living.’

‘So he went to prison, then?’