I don’t react, keeping a perfectly composed veneer. This is amateur stuff: an oedipal complex. He’s mocking the practice now. It’s juvenile but is he doing it to distract me? Or does he actually want to talk more about his parents’ relationship. ‘No, Cormac. That’s an outdated idea. I’m sure your professors told you that. What we are doing now, what I am doing with you, is trying to understand who you are, your background, so we can make a plan moving forward.’

‘A plan for what?’

‘A plan for treatment. You said you wanted to go back to university. The only way they will take you back is if we can help you work through your issues.’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘You’re right.’

‘You want to be a psychologist, correct?’

‘I like to learn about psychology. I don’t know what I want to be.’

I scratch a note in my pad. Interested in academic psychology. ‘Well, you will have to learn about yourself first.’

I glance up at the clock. Three minutes. I let the silence linger. Silence compels clients to fill it; stay silent enough and you tend to get honesty.

‘So, tell me about your father.’

‘You really want to know why I blame him ?’

‘I do,’ I say, turning a page of my pad.

He gives a small tired laugh. ‘My father fell in love with the wrong woman.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He fell in love with someone other than my mother and did something very bad.’

‘What did he do, Cormac?’

He levels me with his gaze as if he’s grown tired of the conversation. ‘He took a knife and stabbed my auntie and my grandfather, and he tried to stab my mother, too. Mum survived but the others didn’t.’ My pen stops dead. My eyes flick up. He’s looking at the window again, his nose is creased in a faint scowl. ‘So you can write that down in your pad. Go on: that is why I blame my father. He is the reason we got as far away as we possibly could. He’s the reason we’re in Melbourne and not Dublin.’

Trauma, I think. Of course it is, of course that’s why he doesn’t feel he is good enough to be happy, to have a scholarship, or to maintain a healthy support network. Trauma. He probably blames himself in some way for the break-up of the marriage and his father’s reaction. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Cormac.’ He hides behind his humour, he tries to use flattery as a distraction, he doesn’t trust men in positions of authority – it’s beginning to make sense. He loved his mother, was raised by her, protected by her. ‘And your mother?’ I’m almost afraid to ask.