You hate yourself and everyone else.’ Rain whipped the windows and leaves were battered off the trees. Water streamed from the gutters. If Jonno didn’t listen to Sparky he was back on family holidays, in rented cottages near the Devon coast, the rain falling, the wind hammering and board games out on the table. Mostly he listened. ‘I was obsessed with it, and Patsy had been. I stayed with it, and she moved on. Three months later – reporting my progress to the magistrate – I saw her and she had a bloke with her. We didn’t speak and she kept going, but her face had gone scarlet. I hadn’t the right to hold on to her. She’d told me the likely cause was a malfunction of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis – if it’s stressed it makes high levels of cortisol and adrenalin, which produce the flight-or-fight reaction in combat. She said that Swedish troops sent to Bosnia with low salival cortisol levels faced a higher risk of the disorder.’ He would be told when he had to go into town for the meeting.
