The first sensation was somewhere in the roof of my head. I could have sworn I smelled rich flowers or freshly cut vegetation. Then a hot sweet oil began burning into the roots of my jaw and my whole mouth started to hiss and sizzle as though it were frying. My eyes streamed and I became frightened to breathe. I was dribbling badly, from my mouth, my nose, my ears, and I wondered if it was blood. They were burning away the muscle, of that there seemed no doubt, for my chin began to drop. I was about to gulp in cool refreshing air when, on Anna’s nodded instruction Tom put his strong hand beneath my jaw and clamped my mouth shut, causing me to bite a corner from my tongue. I could no longer breathe, neither through will nor desire. I could hear the wheels of my chair wriggling somewhere beneath me on the cold stone of the kitchen floor. At last she nodded to Tom and he released his grip. My cheeks suddenly became puffed and a huge flood of liquid poured from the hook of my jaw, into my open mouth and the two pads, yellowed and small, fell out on a bed of saliva. Anna stood upright and wiped the mist from her forehead. ‘There,’ she said, a little breathlessly. ‘You can open your mouth if you want to, can’t you Peter? Ready for a drink now? I’ll bet you are.’ She gestured to Tom to wipe my mouth and front, which he did with a tea-towel while she went to the fridge and poured a glass of milk. ‘Right, Peter,’ she said. ‘Drink.’

She crooked her fingers into the top aspects of the orbits of my eyes and wrenched my head back with an unnecessary violence. She poured the milk into my mouth and I had no choice but to swallow, gobs of air accompanying the icy fluid, making my insides bloat and roll. When she had finished she showed Tom where she was putting the rest of the sachets. He nodded blankly. ‘And now’, she said tartly, ‘I think you should feed him. And none of that liquidized muck either.’

She left the kitchen with the jaunt of a schoolgirl, her heels making hammer taps on the stone floor.

Soon it reached the point where the mere sight of one of those purple sachets dangled before my eyes made my mouth unlock and I would begin unhappily lusting for the odd food Tom brought me, suckling it even though my teeth grated in agony. And the food knifed at my insides and I envisaged whole chunks of stomach, lung and pancreas, being dismembered, rotting, evaporating, being dissipated through my pores, my shit, my breath.

I might have seen their behaviour as unreasonable, though I was never one to criticize. Tom, on the other hand, seemed quietly put out at having had to administer this treatment. Maybe he thought it harsh, unethical. If that was the case then he was not alone, for another member of our queer household emerged with the same opinion.