KREUZER: Oh, no we haven’t. You brought it up—and there we stopped. You had an important engagement. Don’t you remember?

JAMES: There’s no point in the spade. Every child has one. Or so I’ve read. I’ve read a lot about childhood. It helped to fill the gap.

KREUZER: How?

JAMES: I built up an imaginary childhood. That plot of garden. Seed envelopes with coloured pictures that one bought in shops. But there were more important seeds, Doctor, not in packets. Like the best wine of a region that comes from unlabelled bottles. Seeds in old cardboard boxes. One stole them from the gardener and planted them in the ground and one never knew what flower or vegetable would grow. The boxes lay on the earth in the potting shed. (He stops abruptly.)

KREUZER: Go on.

JAMES: I can’t. (He gets up.) It’s too hot in here.

KREUZER: Sit down. I’ll open the window. (He opens the window behind James’s head, and shivers slightly in the cold air. James remains standing.) In what book did you read about the potting shed?

JAMES (agitated): I don’t know. I can’t remember.

KREUZER: Perhaps it was a real potting shed.

JAMES: Yes. A real potting shed. And a month ago I began to walk down the laurel path towards it. It was dark. I was carrying water for my dog. And I didn’t have the courage even to come within sight of the door. Father, can’t you tell me—

KREUZER: You called me Father.

JAMES: So I did. But he’s dead, and he’ll never tell me now.

KREUZER: Relax. Try not to worry. Talk about something else. Forget the potting shed.

JAMES: I had. All those years. (He sits.) But you can’t forget forever what exists. Sooner or later, a smell, a touch—our footsteps make such a pattern over the world in forty years, they’d have to tread the same path again sooner or later. Wouldn’t they, Doctor?

KREUZER: I believe there’s nothing human which can’t somehow with patience be recalled.

JAMES: And do you believe in anything that isn’t human?

KREUZER: No, I don’t believe. Sometimes I doubt my disbelief.

JAMES: What could have happened that was so terrible it wiped out all memory? I was a boy, Doctor. What a boy can do is very limited.

KREUZER: Perhaps it was something done to you.

JAMES: Then why the disgrace? Oh, I know some parents make a fuss about the little sexual games children play. Not my parents, though. It can’t have been anything like that. They were never worried by anything human.

KREUZER: That word “human” again.