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the test results you asked for.’
    Helen Alpert smiled.
    ‘Please don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Your daughter had the hospital copy them to me. She was worried you might lose them on the train.’
    And she slid the documents, three or four sheets of printout in a plastic sleeve, across her desk. Anna, whose history of lost documents was extensive, pushed them back without looking at
    them.
    ‘It was wrong of Marnie to do this,’ she said. ‘It was controlling.’ Then, feeling she had been disloyal, tried to explain: ‘I don’t want tests. I
    don’t want to know these things about myself. I want just to live my life until it’s over. Marnie is the wrong generation to understand that.’
    ‘Neurologically, Anna, you’re very sound. You should be relieved. There are signs of a couple of tiny strokes. Otherwise you’re fine.’
    But Anna – who had feared all along things would go in this direction once Marnie lost her patience – remembered Michael Kearney, trembling in her arms in his paralysis of anxiety,
    and could only repeat, ‘I don’t want to know things like that about myself.’ Helen Alpert identified this, perhaps correctly, as a defensive stubbornness; baffled, they stared
    at one another in silence again until Anna shrugged, looked at her watch, and said: ‘I think my time’s up.’
    ‘Is there anything else?’ the doctor said.
    ‘My cat is bringing home the internal organs of exotic animals.’
    ‘I meant, really, if there was anything else you remembered about the dream.’
    After Anna had gone, the doctor leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes tiredly.
    Helen Alpert was a tall woman, given to skinny jeans and soft leather coats, whose career had begun in the psychology of chronic pain; veered during her troubled second marriage into PTSD and
    trauma management; and finally come to rest in private consulting rooms by the Thames in Chiswick, where she facilitated the inner lives of mid-range production executives from the
    surrounding BBC enclaves. Perhaps ten years younger than Anna, she had made her home on the opposite side of the river in one of the quiet streets around Kew Green. Mornings, she jogged by the
    river. At weekends she wandered the Gardens or drove her temperamental first-generation Citroen XM to a cottage in East Anglia, where she trudged up and down the shingle beaches in the rain
    and ate pea mousse with Parma ham & shallot dressing, followed by roast breast & confit leg of squab on puy lentils with parmentier potatoes and jus, at the local Michelin-starred pub
    conversion. Despite or perhaps because of this regime, she remained single. She had been treating Anna Waterman for three years. It was slow going. They had layered up this peculiar dream of
    Anna’s until it was a rich and satisfying fiction, but not one that offered an easy reading of itself; and they had never seemed quite suited to one another.
    Now, knowing Anna to be too young to have worn 1960s Givenchy, the doctor assumed the garment to be a symbol of the parent, entering the words, ‘The unthought known?’ into
    Anna’s case file and emphasising them heavily.
    Then she leafed back through the file, parts of which were easier to understand than others.
    Born Anne-Marie Selve in 1976, to a provincial couple already in middle age, Anna had formed herself early. Academically focused at eight, she had been obsessive by fourteen. It was a
    familar story. Arriving at Girton a year ahead of her cohort she allowed a further year to pass before succumbing to anorexia. Self-harm and her first suicide attempt followed. By then, the
    parents – never much more than pleasantly surprised to find themselves parents in the first place – were too old to offer emotional help; in addition there remained, according to
    psychiatric reports, some unidentified tension between father and daughter. Girton patched Anna together. For a time she was, as she put it, everyone’s favourite suicide. ‘They
    knocked on my