I believed Dr. Saul when he said, “We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the inside of our own heads. That’s a fact. We have no idea what goes on in the brain when it releases a rush of interleukin-2 in the event of serious inflammation. Nor do we know which harmless sensory perceptions manifest themselves as panic and nightmares for Mr. Skinner, or turn Dr. Foss here into a singing pumpkin.”

Dr. Foss added indignantly, “We do, however, presume that Mr. Skinner doesn’t dream. Narcosis completely stifles a person’s ability to dream.”

“We? I don’t. Is that invisible friend still with you, Fozzie?” asked Dr. Saul.

My creeping fear grows and grows. Each of us is like an archive of themselves. Demons start to crawl from the drawers, compartments, and safes of my memory.

TEN YEARS AGO in that casualty department, I felt anxiety on a scale I’d never previously known. That’s when it was born. It grew inside me like an invasive plant, quickly and greedily, wrapping itself around my organs and gradually crushing them. The thought that my father might die, just like that, in his prime, filled me with panic.

His eyes shone like fjords in the shortest midsummer night. I stayed by his side until they took him away to intensive care and put in the first of three stents. No doctor came to see me after the operation, as they do in those TV hospital series, to say, “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Tomlin. We’re treating your father and four weeks from now he’ll be back outside, mowing the lawn.” There was no one in charge—only stressed, impatient nurses. No doctor, no one to take responsibility.

I stayed with my father. Once he asked, “Is your mother coming?” and I lied, saying, “Yes, tomorrow.” She didn’t pay him a single visit in his last three days.

At the end of those three days my father died on the hospital floor on his way back from the toilet. According to the man in the next bed, his last words were, “At long last I enjoyed a really good night’s sleep,” before he collapsed in “convulsions,” as my mother would later refer to them. “He was in convulsions, Edwina. There was no point in fetching him back a second time, you know. There was no more oxygen in his brain. He wouldn’t have been the same. Like a child . . . or worse.” I hated her for the relief in her voice—amazement too, but above all relief—and for her impatience, her acute impatience, when I burst into tears.

ON THE EVENING it happened, I was sitting in the office of my publishing house, Realitycrash, because I’d nipped in to pick up the manuscript I was editing, an incredible book that was to be my next lead title. I was longing to tell my dad about it.