Anna was back the next Tuesday. By eleven-thirty I was edgy, unable to lie still, unable to concentrate. Irritable. I went to the toilet three times, walked into the door the third time, leaving a red mark right in the middle of my forehead. Shit. I left my room at two minutes past eleven and made my way down to the beige room, which was shut. A moment of panic. She had come and gone. Check the hall clock. Three minutes past. I knocked at the door. ‘Come in, Jess.’

She was seated. Resting back in one of the green Ikea chairs. So there was nothing to do but go in: don’t smile; traverse the room; put my bag down. Why a bag? Why bring a bag? Sit.

‘How are you Jess?’

Silence. How am I? She sat quietly in her chair, hands resting in her lap, waiting for my response. I felt my eyes start darting around the room, bookshelf, ceiling. I tried to bring them back to her, to find in my body the repose she so clearly had in hers. I tried to find a feeling that came from inside, not just this raw prowling certainty of being looked at.

Finally, in a tight trying-not-to-sound-tight little voice, I said, ‘I hate it when you ask that question. I never know what to say.’ Now I could look at her. The ball, I thought, is in your court. Anna didn’t change her expression.

‘Is there something you’d like me to do instead?’ she said.

‘Pardon?’ A quick surge of panic.

‘Is there something else you would like me to do or say?’

Again my eyes started their flickering around the room, her chair, the space above her head.

‘I just feel exposed, I feel as if you’re staring at me.’

‘You don’t like it when I look at you?’

‘No.’

‘You could ask me not to.’

‘We can hardly have a whole session without you looking at me.’ Terse.

‘You could cover your eyes,’ she said, unperturbed, putting her hand, visor-like to her forehead, ‘like this.’

For a moment I felt like laughing. It was ridiculous. Childish. ‘No thanks.’ An exhalation. A snort.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’d feel—silly,’ I said at last.

‘What would you like to do in that case?’ She glanced at the clock. ‘We have, what, fifty minutes to go. Is there something you would like to do with that time?’

I could feel it now. A slow surge deep in my belly. My skin beginning to prickle.

‘I just feel very exposed,’ I said, talking quickly now, trying to keep the feeling down, bat it away, get it off me. Get her off me. ‘I mean it’s silly, I know, weird, that I would feel that way, but it’s just that sometimes in here I feel like an insect—under a microscope.’

I stopped, waiting for her to speak. She kept looking at me, silent, and eventually said carefully, ‘I am aware,’ and paused— annoyed, I thought, she sounds annoyed—‘that I have made several suggestions and none have been acceptable to you. I notice that you are agitated. Irritable. But that you—’ ‘I just don’t like you asking me all these questions,’ I said, petulant, a child.

‘Would you like me to ask you something else?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like me to be quiet?’ She paused and when she spoke again her voice was gentler. ‘I can do that, you know. Or I can do something else. I just don’t know what it is that you want.’

Eventually I said, ‘I don’t want you to be quiet, either.’ I sounded like a child. I heard myself, but I couldn’t stop. I laughed, a nervous snort; trapped in this stupid, stupid conversation. ‘It’s ludicrous, I know.’ Another snort. An appeal.

‘I find it interesting,’ she said. ‘You don’t like where the conversation is going, and then what?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What happens when you don’t like something? What do you do with that?’

And I was stuck again. Trapped. Seconds passed. ‘I can’t— just sit here—and be—looked at,’ I said finally, a compressed whisper. ‘I feel as if you’re judging me.’

‘Would you like to check that feeling out with me?’ she asked, conversationally. ‘Or do you just assume that to be true?’

‘What? Oh no, I don’t, not at all. I’m sure it’s not true. At least, I don’t know, maybe it is. I just, I just—’ I trailed off again, abject, miserable. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ As I spoke, I shook my left arm, sharply. Shit. Shit. Shit. Anna looked at me, looked at my arm.

‘There’s the objection,’ she said, as if she had been waiting. There’s the bus. ‘You might shake your arm again, Jess.’ More a requirement than a request. My arm was lying in my lap now, restless, reluctant, prickles of black dancing beneath the skin. I lifted it a fraction, then dropped it. My body sagged forwards. I shook my head. No.

‘What is happening, Jess?’

I was slumped over, holding my arms around my thighs. ‘Nothing.’

‘Doesn’t look like nothing. Feel how you have collapsed.’

I pushed myself back to sitting, trying to be normal, invisible. Upright. Immediately my left hand started tingling again. I shook it again, once, helplessly, near tears, trying to flick away this feeling, this black feeling under my skin. Then I took it swiftly, almost roughly, with my right hand, held it in my lap.

‘See how you try to check the impulse,’ Anna said, quietly, interested but detached. ‘Notice that you try to block the feeling.’

I was shaking my head now, like a metronome, I thought. Tick. Tick. Can’t stop. Shaking my head, holding my hand, biting my lip. All the time looking at her, willing her to put an end to it.

‘Try saying it then,’ she said after a moment.

‘Saying what?’ I became still.

‘Shit.’

‘No.’ A whisper.

‘No, then. Say “no”.’

I shook my head. I kept looking at her, silently, brought my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them.

‘I can’t.’ I dropped my eyes. A wave of tiredness washed over me.

‘Jess. Come back.’ There was a slight, pleasant lilt at the end of her sentence, a request. ‘Jess, bring your eyes back to mine.’

I closed my eyes, lowered my head to my knees. Drifted.

See. A tiny little thought curled in a shell on the sea floor. Now look what you made me do.

Sometimes when my daughter reaches up to kiss me, I think she does not quite look at me, that her eyes dim slightly, barely discernible, as they meet mine, though her smile is the same, bright and quick, as she steps away and takes Michael’s hand. I used to watch them as they walked together up the concrete steps that led to the street and then to crèche. Once they had started I could not turn away. I had to watch until all of her was gone, even her ankles and her feet in their small red shoes. But I thought that it was all right. I think that she is all right. I told everyone what a great dad Michael was. I joked that I’d married a SNAG, that he was the one she ran to if she had hurt herself. (Though I was the one, I reminded myself, who picked her up at the end of the day and read her stories and gave her butterfly kisses.) Sometimes I was out when they left in the morning, at the newsagent or on a walk or anywhere away from the house. I took my time getting home and I came around the back way, where there was no chance of glimpsing them unexpectedly as they climbed into the car or pulled away. Some mornings I stayed in bed, feigning sleep until I heard the door close and had to race for the bus, hair wet, toast in a plastic bag.

‘They say at crèche that it’s better if you tell the children when you’re going,’ Michael said one morning, ‘and that you’ll be back.

They’ve done research. It makes it easier.’

‘Who for?’ I said, and wished I hadn’t.

Michael thought that if he backed it up with research I might listen. And I might. I did. I heard him. ‘I hear you,’ I said lightly, the second or third time he told me. ‘I hear you. You are heard. Is that right? Is that what I’m meant to say?’

He was silent and shrugged and turned away, scooped up her school bag. ‘Lil,’ he called, ‘time to go. Say goodbye to Mummy.’

It makes me laugh though, the things she comes home with.

‘You’re hurting my feelings,’ she berates me (bedtime perhaps, or bathtime, or maybe I have refused her an ice-cream). ‘I don’t like that.’

Things I would never have dreamed of saying. Still don’t. Things I would not even have known how to think. Feelings. ‘What feelings?’ I say, teasing. ‘Which of those feelings of yours am I hurting?’

‘All of them,’ she says sternly. ‘Especially my angry ones.’

My blister is hurting, a deep ache in the ball of my foot, all the more insistent for the relief over lunch. I have been trying not to think about it, but I realise now that the anticipation and then the dark spreading pain are inescapable. I see them in the flame tones of flowers, in the shapes of shadows on the road. Resistance, pain, momentary relief. A morass of feeling. So that the treading into it feels like a punishment, a personal cruelty inflicted by my brain on my foot (you must walk) and then spreading back up from the foot, which now seems enormous, misshapen, through the rest of my body and back at last to my thoughts (you are cruel; you cannot love). I think about stopping. I think about taking a needle (I have one, I am sure, in the first aid kit) and plunging it into the sole of my foot, opening the tender pool, relieving the pressure. But it is too deep, the pain is too deep, and then there is the raw wound and the risk of infection. I must keep walking. (You cannot love.) I must walk.

All afternoon after the session with Anna I paced. Not outside, I couldn’t leave the building, nor sit nor read nor converse. All afternoon I prowled the corridors and stairs and any room that was empty. In the dining room I stalked around the tables, set and waiting for dinner, barely seeing, feeling only the jolt of my heels on the lino. It was bright outside, still daylight, but the windows transmitted as blanks, reflecting only inward, and my feet in their socks were awkward helpless claws.

Late in the afternoon as I came down the main stairs into the entrance lobby I caught sight of her, suddenly and unaccountably, across the corridor, through the open door of the sitting room. She was leaving her room, the one where she saw her private clients, turning to pull the door behind her, her day’s work done. She looked small at this distance and out of place, one shoulder hitched to keep her bag from slipping: clumsy, unreal. A couple of seconds and she walked out of the frame, heading I supposed for the back exit, the rear car park, her small green Toyota. I stood immobilised on the bottom step, out of time, and after a while noticed my hands gripping the wooden railing. How could I not have known she was still here?

At the last instant I released the banister, sprinted across the sitting room, past the room she had just left, down the hallway to the back door. Even before I got there I saw through the glass panes that she was gone, the car park empty, but I ran anyway, feet scattering the quartz gravel, down the driveway in great shuddering bounds to the entrance, the concrete pillars and the road, which was empty.

In my room I sat at last cross-legged on the bed. I held the pillow to my chest and rocked back and forth, back and forth. I wanted to cry or to shout. I wanted to shout into her face. I wanted to hurt her. ‘I hate you,’ I moaned, ‘I hate you,’ but my voice sounded stringy and vague; it could not find the feeling. I started to make sounds, a thick ugly creaking, un-oiled, unhinged. Sounds I had never made before. I sounded like a cow, like a person shitting, like something stuck. I held my pillow against my mouth, pushed my face into it. Rock and moan. In the end, there was nothing but the sound. No more thoughts or ideas or comparisons. Just a droning in my chest and neck and sinuses. In the end, the sound swallowed me, and after a while I felt calmer.