‘Did you have a cool time?’

‘Very cool,’ I say. ‘But I’ve got a splitting headache.’

David comes into the living room with three mugs of tea on a tray.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I’ve had it for a while. A few days. Anyone got any ideas?’

David laughs. ‘You know GoodNews. He’s full of ideas. But I didn’t think you were interested.’

‘I’m interested in having headaches taken away. Who wouldn’t be? And I can’t take any more paracetamol. I’ve been popping them all day.’

‘You serious?’ says GoodNews. ‘You want the treatment?’

‘Yeah. Why not?’

‘And you’re prepared for what might happen?’ David asks.

‘I’m prepared.’

‘OK, then. Shall we go to the study?’

In a way, I wish I did have a headache, but I don’t; I just have a soul-ache, and I want it taken away, whatever the cost. I have given up. I have not been able to beat them, so I will join them, and if that means that I never again utter a cogent sentence, or think a sardonic thought, or trade banter with colleagues or friends, then so be it. I will sacrifice everything that I have come to think of as me for the sake of my marriage and family unity. Maybe that’s what marriage is anyhow, the death of the personality, and GoodNews is irrelevant: I should have killed myself, as it were, years ago. As I walk up the stairs I feel like I am experiencing my own personal Jonestown.

GoodNews ushers me in and I sit on David’s writing chair.

‘Do I have to take anything off?’ I’m not afraid of GoodNews in that way. I doubt if he has a sexuality. I think it has been subsumed in some way, used as a stock for his spiritual stew.

‘Oh, no. If I can’t get through a couple of layers of cotton, I’m not gonna get through to the inner Katie, am I?’

‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘Just sit there. Where’s the headache?’

I point to a place where a headache might feasibly be, and GoodNews touches it gently.

‘Here?’

‘Yeah.’

He massages it for a little while. It feels good.

‘I’m not getting anything.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I mean, are you sure the headache is there?’

‘Maybe over a bit?’

He moves his fingers along a couple of inches and begins to knead my scalp gently.

‘Nah. Nothing.’

‘Really? Not even—ow!—just there?’

‘Not even just there. Sorry.’

The tone in his voice suggests that he knows I’m faking it, but is too polite to say anything.

‘Is that it, then?’

‘Yeah. Nothing I can do. I can’t find the pain.’

‘Can’t you just do the warm hands thing anyway?’

‘That’s not how it works. There’s got to be something there.’

‘What does that mean?’ I ask this because I know he’s not just talking about the headache. He is talking about something else, something that he thinks is missing, and I believe him to be right: there is something missing, which is why I came into this room in the first place.

‘I dunno. That’s just what my hands tell me. You’re not… I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but you’re not all there. In, like, the spiritual sense of the word.’

‘And David was?’

‘Must have been.’

‘But that’s not fair! David used to be a horrible, sarcastic, uncaring pig!’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t know about that. But there was something to work on. With you… It’s like a flat battery in a car. You know, I’m turning the ignition, and I’m turning the ignition, and it’s just… ker-chunk-ker-chunk-ker-chunk.’

The noise he makes is an uncanny articulation of how I feel.

‘Maybe you need some jump leads,’ says GoodNews cheerfully. ‘Shall we go downstairs and drink our tea?’

Barmy Brian, Heartsink No. 1, is first on my Monday morning list, and he’s not looking good. I know that a doctor’s surgery is not the place to see people looking their best, but Brian has deteriorated rapidly since I last saw him, about three weeks ago. He seems to be wearing pyjamas under his raincoat, he is unshaven, his hair is wild, his face is grey, his breath you would have to file under alcoholic/agricultural.

‘Hello, Brian,’ I say cheerily. ‘In a rush this morning?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Aren’t those pyjamas you’re wearing?’

‘No.’

Even though Brian comes to see me regularly, he mistrusts me intensely and always thinks that I am trying to catch him out, as if I think that he is not who he says he is. Perhaps he isn’t—perhaps he’s Mental Mike, or Crazy Colin, or Loony Len—but my more or less constant position is that, whoever he is, he’s not a well man, and therefore in need of my help. It’s not the way he sees it, though. He seems to feel that if I succeed in unmasking him, I will banish him from the surgery.

‘I see. You’re just wearing matching pink-and-blue striped shirt and trousers.’

‘No.’

I don’t push it (although believe me, he is wearing pyjamas, and he is only denying it because to admit it would give me some sort of crucial information he’d rather I didn’t have). There are unwritten rules for dealing with BB: you’re allowed some fun—otherwise we would all be as barmy as he is—but not too much fun.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve got a bad stomach. I’m getting pains.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Here.’

He points to his abdomen. I know from previous experience that I am not allowed to touch any part of BB’s body, but as most of BB’s troubles are caused, not by physiological malfunction, but by the first B of his name, this is not usually much of a handicap.

‘Have you been feeling nauseous? Sick?’

‘No.’

‘What about going to the toilet? Has that been OK?’

‘How do you mean?’ The tone of suspicion has returned.

‘Now, come on, Brian. If you’re having abdominal pain I need to ask you questions like this.’ A couple of years ago Brian frantically denied that he ever passed stools, and would only admit to peeing; I was reduced to insisting that I, too, had bowel movements, but he wouldn’t listen, and nor was he interested in hearing confessions from other members of staff.

‘I’ve stopped going.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Couple of weeks.’

‘That may well be your problem, then.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Two weeks without going to the loo is enough to give you a tummy ache. Has there been a change in your diet?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Are you eating different things?’

‘Yeah. Course.’ And he snorts, to emphasize the stupidity of the question.

‘Why?’

‘Because my mum died, didn’t she?’

If GoodNews were to touch my head now, he wouldn’t say that I had a flat battery. He would say that there were all sorts of things going on: pity, sadness, panic, hopelessness. I hadn’t realized that Brian had a mum—he is, according to my notes, fifty-one years old—but it makes complete sense. Of course there would have been a mum, and of course she would have kept the Brian show on the road, and now she has gone, and there are pyjamas and abdominal cramps.

‘I’m sorry, Brian.’

‘She was old old old. She said she’d die one day. But, see, how did she make the food hot? And how are you supposed to know what should be hot and what shouldn’t? ‘Cos sometimes we had ham. Cold. And sometimes we had bacon. Hot. And when you buy it they don’t tell you which one is which. I thought they would. I’ve been buying it, but I don’t know what to do with it. What about lettuce and cabbage? What about hot chicken and cold chicken? And I’m sure we had cold potatoes once, but they’re not like the cold potatoes that you buy in the shop. They were horrible, the ones I bought. I think I bought hot ones by mistake, but they were cold hot ones. I get muddled. I got muddled when I ate them and now I get muddled when I buy them. I feel very muddled.’

This is, I think, one of the saddest speeches I have ever heard, and it is all I can do to stop myself embracing poor Brian and weeping on his shoulder. ‘I feel very muddled, too,’ I want to tell him. ‘We all do. Not knowing what should be eaten raw and what you should cook isn’t such a big deal, when you consider the things other people get muddled about.’