Von Trapp! Those were the children in The Sound of Music. You see! Things really do come back when you relax. The Von Trapp Family Singers…

This has been a wonderful and encouraging day.

‘So now, Ned my friend, how are you today?’

‘I’m very well, Dr Mallo, but I wonder if I can ask you something?’

‘Of course. You know that you can ask me anything you please.’

‘I think it’s wrong that you still call me Ned.’

‘We have talked of this before. I am very happy to call you what pleases you. Have you perhaps another name for me? A remembered name?’

Ned wrinkled his brow at this. ‘Well, sometimes I think I might be Ashley.’

‘You would like me to call you Ashley?’

‘I don’t think so. It isn’t quite right. I’m sure that I do remember an Ashley and that I think of him with someone like me. I associate the name Ashley with pretending to be something you aren’t, but it’s all a little confused. I don’t think Ashley is me. I was hoping you might think up a name. My real name may come back to me soon, but in the meantime, anything you give me is better than Ned. The name Ned is beginning to annoy me.

‘Very well. I shall call you…’ Dr Mallo looked around the room as if expecting to light upon an object that would offer a connection to a suitable name. ‘I shall call you Thomas,’ he said, after gazing for a while at a picture on the wall behind Ned. ‘How is Thomas? An English name I think, for you are an English young man. This we know.’

‘Thomas …' Ned repeated the name with pleasure. ‘Thomas…’ he said again, with the delight of a child unwrapping a present. ‘Thomas is very good, doctor. Thank you. I like that very much.’

‘So we shall call you Thomas,’ said Dr Mallo, ‘but I need to believe that you understand the name. It is an escape from Ned, a symbol, we shall say, of a new beginning. It is important you are realistic with this name and do not imagine that Thomas has a past into which you may retreat. It is a name we have conjured up together here for convenience and to mark your progress. Nothing more.

‘Absolutely!’

‘So now, Thomas my young friend. How have you been?’

‘I think I’ve been well,’ said Ned. ‘I’ve been very happy lately.’

The sound of the new name in his ears was wonderful, it released a feeling to be hoarded and treasured in his room later. ‘Hello there, Thomas.’ ‘Thomas, good to see you. ‘Oh look, there’s Thomas!’ ‘Good old Thomas…

‘And at last,’ said Dr Mallo, looking at a tall sheaf of paper in front of him, the trace of a smile on his lips. ‘I am beginning to be able to read your writing without great effort.’

‘It is better, isn’t it?’ Ned agreed enthusiastically. ‘I find I can shape the letters so much more easily now.

‘And more slowly I hope? With less excitement?’

‘Completely.’

‘You are growing quite a beard now. Does it bother you?’

‘Well,’ Ned’s hand went to his face. ‘It has taken some getting used to. It itches and it must look very odd, I suppose.

‘No, no. Why should it look odd? A beard is a most natural thing.’

‘Well …

‘You would like to see yourself in your beard?’

‘May I? May I really?’ Ned’s legs started to jog up and down on the balls of his feet.

‘I do not see why not.’

Dr Mallo opened a drawer in his desk and brought out a small hand-mirror which he passed across to Ned, who took it and held it on his jiggling knees, face turned away.

‘You are afraid to look?’

‘I’m – I’m not sure.

‘Set your heels to the floor and take some deep breaths. One-two-three, one-two-three.’

Ned’s knees stopped their jogging and he moved his head. He lifted the mirror from his lap, swallowed twice and slowly opened his eyes.

‘What do you think?’

Ned was looking at a face that he did not know. The face stared back at him in equal surprise and horror. It was a gaunt face, a face of hard cheekbones and deep-set eyes. The straw-coloured hair on its head was long, hanging lankly over the ears, the beard hair seemed coarser and tinged with a suggestion of red. Ned put a hand to his own face, and saw a bony hand rubbing the beard line of the face in the mirror and pulling at its moustache.

‘You like this face?’

Ned tried to avoid meeting the eyes in the mirror. They were resentful and coldly blue. They seemed to dislike him.

‘Who is he?’ Ned cried. ‘Who is this man? I don’t know him!’

The face in the mirror had tears streaking its beard. It licked its cracked lips. Its mouth pursed in disgust at the face of Thomas looking in.

‘That is enough. Give me the mirror now.

‘Who is he? He hates me! Who is he? Who is he? That isn’t me! Is it Thomas? It isn’t Ned. Who is it?’

Dr Mallo pressed a buzzer on the underside of his desk and sighed. Foolish of him to have tried such an experiment. A distasteful display, yet fascinating also. Such pitiable distress, such complete dislocation of subject. Mallo’s student dissertation on the work of Piaget came back to him. If he were still a man of academic energy there could be a paper in this. But Mallo’s days of professional ambition were behind him. He watched Rolf come into the room, wrestle the mirror away and snap bracelets on the boy’s wrists with the methodical efficiency that never deserted him.

‘Calm yourself, Thomas. You see now I hope that there is still a long way for you to go. We will allow you a period of calm for a while. No more writing for the time being, just peaceful reflection. Chlorpromazine,’ he added to Rolf, ‘75 milligrams, I think.’

Ned’s eyes were fixed on the hand-mirror which lay face down on the desk. He was not aware of Rolf pulling up his sleeve. His mind was filled only with a desire to see that haggard face once more and to tear its malevolent eyes from their sockets.

There were special days that came very rarely, days when the food was piled high on Ned’s tray and flower vases and bowls filled with fresh fruit were placed on his table. In the mornings Martin and Rolf would lead him out of the room and stand him under a shower at the end of the corridor. They would hold him there and sponge him clean. Then, still under the shower-head, but with the flow of water turned off, they would cut his hair and shave his beard. His room too, when he returned to it, would have been scrubbed clean and washed. The chamber pot would have gone and the sweet scent of pine room-freshener would hang in the air.

In the afternoons of these extraordinary days Dr Mallo would visit him, together with two others, a man and a woman who did not wear white coats and who brought the atmosphere of the outside world into the room with them. The woman’s handbag and the man’s briefcase fascinated Ned. They bore flavours and smells that were intriguing, enchanting and frightening too.

They all spoke to each other in a language that Ned could not understand, the same language that Rolf and Martin spoke and that he had decided long ago was Scandinavian. He heard his name mentioned in those conversations, always as Thomas now, they never used the name Ned any more.

The woman liked to talk to him sometimes.

‘Do you remember me?’ she would ask, in thickly accented English.

‘Yes, how are you?’ Ned would reply.

‘But how are you?’

‘Oh, I am much better thank you. Much better.’

‘Are you happy here?’

‘Very happy thank you. Yes. Very happy indeed.’

One day in summer they came again, but this time there were three of them. The same couple as before but with another woman, younger than the other, and a great deal more inquisitive. Ned picked up Dr Mallo’s tension at her questions and did his best to say what he thought the doctor expected and wanted of him.