We should all of us be shrieking in terror from birth to death, and it is the strangest fact that we are not.

The feeling was peculiarly bonding, her face so close to mine, smiling, and her touch so intimate and gentle that I felt the lightness of being that comes from having the skin delicately touched. This became even more pronounced when she attached the electrodes to my head, my scalp fizzing from how gently she was touching me, a feeling I’ve always associated with the giddiness of haircuts as a child: a stranger lightly handling my skull as if tapping a balloon through a thicket of thorns.

I could have been kinder to Mrs Weskitt, but there isn’t a child of twelve who couldn’t. It’s the age when we sort into different not alike, a state that reaches its peak in adolescence, and one of the foremost blights in the world today is that many adults have never grown out of that adolescent pose of insisting on difference.

For Paul an argument was knotting, a cramp. For Mari an argument was an unravelling, a release, and in no time at all she was asleep.

The villagers I saw were contained, not unfriendly as such but a stranger was noticed. A noticing eye has a fraction more weight than another eye – certainly a city eye – and the wary attention soon built up to something I could feel on my skin.

Nothing is more socially awkward than finding the laughter has stopped around you, and you can’t help but search for something that you have done to explain why the goodwill of others has so suddenly been snatched away with no understanding of why it has been withheld.

His eyes widened and narrowed in short order to signal a flare of intellectual interest that I recall knowing in my bones was a look he’d practised in a mirror.

As has been the model of my whole life, the guilt pitched me into silent reflection of how I might make up the offence, and I mulled different paths of atonement in a silence that (in the moment) I’ve never fully grasped is being misinterpreted and worsening an already strained situation.