‘The pills you gave me aren’t working,’ he said to Dr Foley. He had to stop himself apologizing for being there again and for wasting the doctor’s time, when the surgery was full of patients with real illnesses, real pain.

‘Still having trouble sleeping?’ Dr Foley wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at his computer screen and tapping something into it, frowning.

‘It’s not just that.’ He tried to keep his voice steady. His face felt rubbery, as though it belonged to someone else. ‘I get these horrible feelings.’

‘You mean pain?’

‘My heart feels like it’s being pumped up and there’s a metallic taste in my mouth. I don’t know.’ He struggled for words but couldn’t find them. All he could say was: ‘I don’t feel myself.’ It was a phrase he kept using, and each time he did so, it felt as though he was digging a hole inside himself. Once he had cried out to Carrie, ‘I can’t feel myself,’ and even at the time he had recognized how odd that sounded.

Dr Foley turned his chair and faced him. ‘Has anything been troubling you lately?’

Alan didn’t like him staring at his computer but he preferred that to being looked at like this: as if the doctor was looking inside him at things Alan didn’t want to know about. What could he see?

‘I had it when I was much younger, this feeling of panic. It was a feeling of loneliness, like in a nightmare, of being completely alone in the universe. Of wanting something, but I didn’t know what. After a few months, it went away. Now it’s back.’ He waited, but Dr Foley didn’t react: he didn’t seem to have heard him. ‘It was when I was at college. I thought it was the sort of problem people got at that age. Now I think I’m having a mid-life crisis. It’s stupid, I know.’