I had never met Nathaniel before, his family doctor being one of my colleagues. The patient was tall and thin, slightly bent over, with short but wild black hair erupting over a high dome-like forehead. In fact, his head seemed too heavy for his neck to support and he held it to one side, virtually resting it on one shoulder. His eyes were very piercing yet somehow old. They were almost as black as his hair; an impression intensified by the glowing whiteness of his face. Dressed entirely in black he was on the darker, Gothic side of Romantic. He was not exactly clumsy in his movements, but he was self-conscious to a painful degree. He surveyed the view from my window whilst eagerly sipping his tea, which was piping hot. A somewhat fastidious appetite was, at least, intact, as he would take neither sugar nor milk. Eventually I coaxed him into a chair. I thought he looked like a mad doll, but quickly dispensed with the dangerous preconceptions suggested by his appearance, and began the gentle probing of his psyche.

“Well, what do I call you?” My usual opening gambit in such situations.

I already knew his strange and peculiarly pronounced name from the brief conversation I had had with his mother: “Nathaniel Snoxell”.

“That’s perfect iambic pentameter!” I had exclaimed.

“Yes”, she had said, suddenly calm. “He was a very poetic baby”.

I wondered, however, if he preferred to be called by an abbreviation or nickname. I had expected at best a morose reply, but was surprised by his smile and his laughter. So many things, it seemed, had to be contained within that laughter.

“Nat”.

This high-pitched, monotone, monosyllabic form of verbal communication was, I soon found, greatly favoured by him and, at first, he practiced it almost exclusively. It had taken him a long time to reply, and after the utterance he returned to studying the pattern of my carpet.

“Well, Nat, where do we go from here?” I prodded. “Usually people are carted off to mental hospitals for what you’ve just done”. I was attempting to provoke him into responding. “It’s not exactly Britain’s favourite way of ending it all, is it?”

Between long pauses he informed me of his high ideals and how the cruel world had shattered all his hopes; a familiar enough story. He grimaced frequently, lending pathos to each precisely worded statement. Nat had a magical reverence for certain things which had only recently been dashed. He had struggled to break free of his family, but the ties with his childhood had proved too strong, and he had allowed his mother to brow-beat him into finding work, in a toy shop. This was the antithesis of all his artistic and spiritual ideals. He had therefore decided to annihilate his existence.