There was nothing. It was as if no tree had ever grown up here. The only objects lying around, for reasons I could not fathom, were seashells. In desperation I took a large whelk and dusted the grit off it as the master prised open my father’s jaws. Such cruelty to make him safe. I jammed the shell into his mouth so that the spirals of it sat between his teeth. But no sooner had I got my fingers clear of his lips than he ground down on the shell and it exploded in his mouth. Fragments of newly white shell landed on his chest and shoulder, and blood began to trickle from the corner of his mouth.

He roared in anger, fear, delirium. Violent waves passed though him, racked him, and he grunted in pain as they locked his muscles.

‘How could you—let—this happen? Aargh! Get them off me! They will kill me! Fuck! Fuck! Fu—huh…poisonous ones, I know them. I know all of them, ’specially these…’

He clenched his teeth again: his shirt was open and he was tearing at his chest with his fingernails. Long red welts appeared and began to bleed and to my horror I saw a curl of his skin under the longest nail. But he went again, this time horizontally, scratching repeatedly over the wounds he’d made.

‘The young of them! Just as poisonous!’

‘Take his arms,’ said the master. He wrapped one of them underneath my father so that it was pinned by his own weight. A glimpse of his face: somehow determined and confident in its sadness and isolation. I grappled with the other arm but could not hold it down. My father’s strength had become extraordinary: I had never felt it like this, in all the times I had picked him up, wrestled him down, evaded his blows. The thrashing had raised the dust of the cave floor and it covered his clothes and the hairs on his forearms. He is my father, he is my father. He got the hand free again and raked at his left eye. One nail caught the lower eyelid and tore it so that I saw a flash of the white under there, then blood, the brightest colour in the cave. Now he was weeping in pain, but it wasn’t the eye. His hands had clawed themselves and he lifted them to his eyes and I realised that he believed he could see them.

‘Pliers! My knuckles!’

The doctor was above me, bent forward and peering intently into my father’s face. Suddenly his voice came: unhurried, untroubled. ‘Strike him.’

I looked up at him in confusion.

‘I cannot,’ he said reasonably. ‘It is better that you do. It may help bring him round.’

I trusted the eyes I saw then. And yet I hesitated.

‘You must,’ he said gently.