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to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.

    There are five semicolons in that quote. I remember making the ;;;;; on the wall with the marker pen. I had underlined ‘religious conversion’ twice.
    My father suffered a religious conversion but as far as I know he has not got over it. In fact he has married a woman four years older than I am and they have a new baby. She is twenty-nine. He is sixty-nine. A few years before he met his new wife, he inherited a fortune from his grandfather’s shipping business in Athens. He must have seen it as a sign that he was on the right track. God brought him money just as his country was going bankrupt. And love. And a baby girl. I have not seen my father since I was fourteen. He has seen noreason to part with a single euro of his newly acquired wealth, so I am my mother’s burden. She is my creditor and I pay her with my legs. They are always running around for her.
    To sign off the loan to pay the Gómez Clinic we had to go together to Rose’s mortgage provider for an interview.
    I took the morning off work which meant I lost eighteen pounds and thirty pence for three hours. It was raining and the corporate red carpet was damp. Everywhere there were words on posters telling us how much our well-being meant to the bank, as if human rights were their major concern. The man sitting behind his computer had been trained to be cheerful and friendly; to imitate empathy as he understood it; to be approachable and energetic as he understood it; to love his ugly red tie with the bank’s logo on it. His red badge displayed his name and job description, but it did not tell us his salary scale – probably somewhere in the region of dignified poverty. He was attempting to be personal; to be fair in his approach to our situation; to speak to us in simple language we would understand. A poster of three unattractive employees stared at us from the wall, all of them laughing. The woman was in a female suit (jacket with skirt), the men in male suits (jacket with trousers), their message conveyed our similarities and erased our differences; we are sensible dreamers with bad teeth just like you; we all want a place of our own to argue with the family on Christmas Day.
    I could see that these posters were a rite of initiation (into property, investments, debt) and that the corporate suits signalled a sacrifice of the complexity of gender distinctions. Another poster displayed a photograph of a neat semi-detached house with a front garden the size of a grave. There were no flowers in that garden, just newly laid grass. It looked desolate. The squares of turf had not yet grown into each other. Perhaps a paranoid personality was lurking to the left of the story they were building for us. He had cut down all the flowers and murdered the household pets.
    Our man spoke in a tone that was animated but robotic. At thestart he said, ‘Hi, you Guys,’ but at least he did not say, ‘Hello, Ladies,’ before he rattled off the products available to strip me of my inheritance. At one point he asked my mother if she ate steak. It was a question out of the blue, but we could see where he was heading (lavish lifestyle) so Rose told him she was a vegan because she wanted to promote a more humane and caring world. If she was feeling extravagant, she said she’d add a tablespoon of yogurt to the dahl and rice. He did not know that vegans do not eat dairy products, otherwise she would have fallen out of the corporate red chair at the first hurdle. He asked if she liked designer clothes. She said she only liked cheap, ugly clothes. Did she belong to a gym? A strange question, given that my mother was clutching a walking stick and a bandage was wrapped around each of her swollen ankles, despite the