The old man, an ex-patient employed by the Centre, need not have worried. He wheeled me into the office. My history lay open on a desk. The atmosphere was hot, dense, and I could almost taste the antagonism between Anna and the man who stared out of the window, his back to us, refusing to acknowledge our entrance. ‘My name’, he said, addressing the snow on the drive beneath the window, ‘is John. I am the Director of the One World Rehabilitation Centre.’ He snorted, turned and came over to me. He leant forward, lifting his glasses to take a closer look, then stepped back a pace perturbed, no doubt, by the redolence of vomit on my clothes and faint breath. He seemed to cool a little at this, as if obscurely impressed. He then went through a seemingly practised speech explaining the function of the house, its policy of taking unusual and difficult cases which ordinary mental hospitals had neither the time, will, nor specialist techniques to tackle effectively. He went on to explain that they were about to formulate a contract to which I would be obliged to adhere and which gave a structure to my ‘treatment’, such, he said, as it might be. He was trying his hardest to be professional, even convivial, but I had the strong impression that I was not the kind of material he wanted in ‘his house’. Anna was to blame. She had chosen badly and his record would suffer, though he would not be able to return me to the hospital without some token effort: that would have made a dreadful smear on his record, his accountability to, well, whoever.

Tom, as if the recipient of some reprieve, was cheerful, light-hearted as we left the office. He dragged the chair up the two half-flights of stairs and along a dark, creaking landing to the room which I had been allotted. Inside was a single bed, carpet and curtains, a washbasin, a wardrobe and two chests of drawers, into each drawer of which he deposited items of my luggage. The wind rapped on the roof of the house. When he had finished he said he was leaving me for a while to let me get accustomed to my new surroundings. Anyway, he had to make tea for everyone.

I began to wonder at the space which seemed to be suddenly and irretrievably unfolding around me, pouring out of me into a void, my faint horizons broken by this day nagging at me, threatening to suck me out of myself, innards drawn through a circle of my own flesh till I was gone. Harrowing, sinister moments, real, too real to bear thinking about.

The daylight failed quickly and soon I was in complete darkness save for a narrow strip of light at the foot of the door. I listened to the strange footsteps on the landing and running along the hall downstairs. Lights were switched on and off, a television was booming somewhere, voices called, and I was remembered.