Since the fit I have been given more freedom. Now I have made myself pathetic it appears that they are prepared to trust me a little more. Ideally for them, I would be a static blob on the bed, mouth agape, popping pills in one end and popping pellets out the other. As it is, the Squeak reluctantly takes me out into the garden into the recommended fresh air – presumably recommended by Dr. Robinson. I’m glad of it. It’s a sunny day and surprisingly warm with the blankets wrapped round me. The Squeak is not a nature lover; sunshine makes her sneeze, she says. Fresh air does not agree with her, she says proudly, like she has a diagnosed condition: Arselazyitis. So we head straight for the bench so that she can get on with her word-search puzzle. I’m out of the wheelchair now but we walk slowly, as if I am an old person. Even the laptop feels heavy in my arms. My body is feeble. I looked down at it in the shower this morning – tepid, as I’m still sensitive to hot water – and it was unfamiliar: I’m translucent, scrawny and sexless. Like an alien, without the benefits.

But I do have an admirer. Mental Sita is in the garden too. She has a visitor, her mother, I think – an oval-shaped woman in a sparkling sari who appears to be neither cold nor self-conscious about the copious rolling folds around her midriff. This must be where Mental Sita gets her sense of abandon from. She herself is frolicking about the lawn collecting blades of grass, leaping from one patch to the other, confused and marvelling all at once for it seems that she cannot work out how the grass is greener on her left than her right. Look up at the light, lunatic!

The Squeak directs me towards another bench as Mental Sita’s mother got there before us. She’s gorging on a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk, unconcerned with the prancing goat before her.

How nice for Mental Sita to have a visitor. I haven’t had anyone since the Weasel and that seems a very long time ago now. I cannot stop thinking about my old dad and how he is coping without my mum. Not well, I know that. He can’t even get himself together to come and see me; it would have been nice for the Weasel to have brought him along.