As my physical condition improved, I graduated to a series of encounters that seemed intended to test my cognitive abilities.

One of my instructors was the man who had examined me with the torch. The same brown eyes addressed me over the gauze mask. He sat behind a low table; I was in my wheelchair. On the table lay an array of coloured plastic shapes which he mixed and shuffled about with the air of a card sharp. He took out a red square and placed it in a bare space in front of him. Then he examined me intently for a response.

You need to understand who I am, who I have been. An impulse to excel academically has been with me from an early age. Part of me wanted nothing more than to graduate from that purgatory with honours.

Lifting my arm with great care, I extended it across the table. My instructor watched me with a notable expectation. I dropped my arm onto the table and swept the pieces to the floor.

I surprised myself with my spirit of defiance. I’ve even wondered if it’s really mine, and not some trace, some palimpsest of the previous tenant.

My insubordination provoked a fresh battery of diagnostic tests. I was placed in a metal tube for hours with electrodes attached to my head; I was shown montages of nature documentaries while odours – I recall, specifically, cheese, manure and rose petals – were pumped into the room around me. I was made to step over low hurdles, walk along a balance beam, catch tennis balls. The exercises were timetabled with scrupulous exactitude: forty minutes of work; a rest period of ten.

I underwent a form of speech therapy. It was conducted by a masked female instructor in the regulation blue uniform. She used a rather ghastly rubber head, which resembled one of those dolls on which I was taught CPR as a designated first-aider at the university. The tongue, teeth and mouthparts of the doll were pliable and anatomically exact. The instructor manipulated them into a specific shape and then played the relevant sounds on a chunky tape recorder, whose anachronism, even at the time, struck me as absurd. Much of the time my efforts to speak resulted in silence; when noises did emerge from my mouth they were discouragingly bestial. Still, she persevered with no trace of impatience.

*

One lunchtime, I was taken into a long bright room which, in a more benign context, might have been used for school assembly.

A dark-haired balding man with a fleshy mouth sat on a folding chair behind a table set up in the room’s centre.

I was escorted to a chair opposite him. Two masked attendants stood just behind me. One of them inserted a leather strap into my mouth; it lay slightly under my tongue, like a horse’s bit.

The novelty of the man’s unmasked face preoccupied me. I watched as he shuffled some papers on his desk. I couldn’t say with any precision where he was from. He was of vaguely Mediterranean appearance, but when he spoke, he had the indeterminate American accent of a call-centre operator.

‘My name is John Smith,’ he said, in the tone that Fenella Webster would probably describe as affectless. ‘It’s my job to ensure that you are happy and comfortable here. Please indicate that you have understood.’ He made no effort to meet my eye; he was fussing with something in front of him. I remained silent. Now he looked up at me. ‘Please indicate that you have understood.’ His face was as unreadable as the plastic head on which I was learning to pronounce my vowels.

The attendants stepped slightly away from me and a wave of pain seemed to root me to the floor. When it passed, he was still looking at me. ‘Please indicate that you have understood.’ This time, I nodded.

‘Good job,’ he said. ‘In front of you, you will see a series of pictures. Please pick the one that most closely describes the idea fast. Can you indicate if you’ve understood the question?’

I nodded. The array in front of me depicted a tortoise, a tree and a bird in flight. I tapped the picture of the bird.

‘Good job.’ He selected a new array from the box in his lap.

The pictures he laid out in front of me looked like photos from a family album. There was a little girl of about seven, an adult woman in a headscarf smiling and holding a paint roller, and a boy of ten posing in a football strip that I didn’t recognise.

‘This time, please pick the card that most closely represents the word Irene.’

For a moment I thought he was joking. I looked at him in vain for a clue. Time was passing. I decided to pick the little girl, but before I could raise my hand the attendants moved away and another surge of electricity compressed my gut; this one lasted twice as long as the first.

‘It’s important to me that we do this exercise properly,’ he said. ‘That means no guessing. Can you indicate that you’ve understood?’

And so it went on for the remainder of the forty-minute session: facile questions alternating with incomprehensible ones. I became stressed and jumpy each time he changed the array. I attempted every possible approach to the incomprehensible questions: answering, not answering, gazing at him blankly, shaking my head. Nothing made any difference. The shocks seemed to increase in length and intensity.

‘It’s important to me that we do this exercise properly. Can you indicate that you’ve understood?’

Finally, he called a halt to the torment. The attendant removed the bit. I took my first unobstructed breaths. ‘Thank you for your hard work today,’ he said. He flexed his mouth in a perfunctory smile. ‘See you tomorrow.’

*

That evening I watched a mosquito sink its proboscis into the unfamiliar heft of my upper arm, drink its fill, then fly away laden with this alien’s blood. I thought of Jack and I experienced a wave of grief that seemed to crash uselessly on the obdurate walls of this vessel.

The next morning I was wheeled down to a common room in a distant wing of the building. The room was dimly lit and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. Around me were half a dozen broken figures slumped in wheelchairs. Most of us were inert; one twitched restlessly; another, his eyes shut, the top of his skull ribbed horribly, like a walnut, began speaking. ‘We must attend to the difference between what men in general cannot do if they would, and what every man may do if he would,’ he said, in a shrill and grating voice. ‘Sixteen-string Jack towered above the common mark!’

I listened with an unease that shaded into horror as he repeated himself word for word with identical intonation more than a hundred times.

*

The sessions with John Smith continued each day. On alternate afternoons, I was parked in the common room with the vegetative carcasses and Sixteen-string Jack for two interminable hours.

One afternoon, I began screaming at my orderly as he wheeled me towards my appointment. It was to no avail. Then I felt something like a solid object forming in my mouth. I released it almost involuntarily. It was the word ‘book’. Panic and rage gave way to a feeling of wonder. I uttered it again and again, relishing the deliberateness of the sensation; the kick of the terminal consonant on my soft palate. It was almost magical, the sense that I had regained control over a portion of reality. The orderly turned me round and took me back to my room. Tomatoes and fresh fruit appeared beside the stodge on my tray at dinner time.

The sessions with John Smith ceased. In retrospect, it seems likely to me that his questions and the seemingly random punishments were designed to use stress and frustration to knit my consciousness into the new carcass, but that is clearly only my conjecture. The period of convalescence that followed was slower, but more comprehensible, and there were even moments of profound relief as I edged towards more finely co-ordinated use of this body and began to bring its recalcitrant tongue under my control.