Apart from his family and myself there has been just one other personage Nat has deigned to see. Simeon’s family have known Nat’s family for many years, and Nat and Simeon’s friendship has grown over the last few years. Simeon is an artist: a B.A., at present taking a year out as a “ward skivvy”—nursing assistant at a psychiatric hospital. He shares many of Nat’s obsessions, although not to the same degree. Nat says there is a kind of bond between them: an inability to get on with other people, I gather. Simeon has visited Nat several times since hearing of the suicide attempt. It seems he was thinking of doing something similar: patricide, I think. Nat was keen to impress upon me that Simeon’s family live in a 1930s mock Tudor house, which Simeon had left when seventeen to go to art school. Simeon “probes” Nat in a very heavy-handed manner, a sort of pseudopsychology, from what I can discern. Apparently he took an A-level in sociology and failed it. I consider him a relatively harmless influence on my patient. His questioning is crude in the extreme. He bullies Nat relentlessly with hours of such aimless interrogation. Simeon suggested Nat should pay me a token sum from his sickness benefit, but Nat sarcastically pointed out that this custom originated because of Freud’s religious background.

It is still proving very difficult to get to the root of Nat’s illness. His depression follows the classic pattern of being harshest in the morning and lessening as the day wears on. It has slightly lessened its grip of late, but Nat is still at risk. In many respects Nat is very stubborn, but I cannot stay angry with him for more than two minutes at a time. I have never known such wayward charm. At times, though, he feels murderous. Paradoxically, I know he has the wherewithal to kill himself and yet I do not think that he could ever kill another person: he is emphatically one who could not deliberately injure a fly.

Encouragingly, he still does some household chores, the only male in the family to do so. He also still insists on cooking his own food.

At first, one or other of his parents stayed off work to be with him—in case. Each member of the family dragged him out to various places, in what proved to be futile attempts to show him what they found so positive about life. Even Simeon inundated him with his own brand of propaganda, if indeed Zen can be called propaganda. Each of these acts was undoubtedly undertaken with the greatest sincerity, but they have all served only to make Nat feel even more alienated than ever. He is essentially apathetic, lying in bed virtually all day, glancing at the blue sky or watching cloud formations.