When Nat started school he adapted his behaviour to resemble that of his peers. Perhaps we all do this; not everyone is able to, but he certainly faded into the background. He remained outstanding at art, winning numerous competitions. Even then, however, he destroyed his crayoned efforts. A teacher had said that if the pupils didn’t want their drawings, they should leave them at the school to be stored, or hung on the wall: on no account should they ever throw pictures away. Nat tore one of his drawings to shreds and dropped the remains in the churchyard which he walked through every day, to and from school. A fellow pupil, a little girl in the class above Nat’s who lived only a few doors from his own house, discovered the misdemeanour and took a fragment to show the teacher. Nat complained that those colours could never be his. The little girl, however, had cleverly chosen the one piece of paper that bore his childish signature. This little incident did not change his attitude towards his pictures. He needed to make something, but not with the wise elders watching over his shoulder.

The friends he chose were invariably outsiders, who eventually came to reject him; or else their families, with an uncanny regularity, moved away from the area; or they became very ill. This bad luck with relationships also dogged his father, whose idea of helping Nat back to normality has been to recount in great detail his own entire life history.

“Ah, the curse of the Snoxells”, I quipped, much to Nat’s amusement. He tried to make something of the child repeating the parent’s experience, but I could tell he despised such a notion.

By the time he was nine, Nat was an avid collector of fungi, placing the caps on paper and preserving the patterns made by the spores. Later he was found to be allergic to such fungal emissions and his huge collection of spores was destroyed. He did, however, go on picking a wide variety of toadstools and mushrooms to cultivate and to eat, but only after a course of injections had made him immune to the minute seedlings.

Nat was most careful to recount any scrap of information he felt might be helpful, within his own limitations: he still refused to discuss sex.

Nothing seemed of any use. Although the childish memories brought many smiles to his face he continually reiterated his intention to take his life.

“Well, it won’t be the first death in a family”, I found myself uttering in desperation.

FRI NOV 30

It is becoming clear that whatever troubles Nat to the very core of his existence will not be found within the conscious memories of childhood. It is important that he realises this.

I have several wild theories, the least improbable being that some buried trauma, sustained early in life, is now too harsh to exist anywhere other than deep in his subconscious. In order to try and discover if his conscious mind was guarding a dark secret, I resorted to some psychological games.