What happened at the so-called dancing class does not, in fact, show that my mother’s lifelong terror of all the animals was anything other than real and genuine and to some extent rational.

Her fear so comprehensive and consistent: of the wild and the domestic; of the agricultural and the moulded; of the living and the ones dead for any reason; of the framed historicals and the lonely beasts encoded in cryptic crossword clues; an aversion so vivid and persuasive that she would routinely detour as many aisles as it took to avoid the meat fridges, shielding her eyes with a forearm as she wheeled past the fish counter.

And taking it all so personally: their leathers and their suedes; their honeys and their cosmetics; and, naturally enough, all that territorial silk.

Homely or savage or fashioned into sellable goods, deceased or stuffed, or porcelain, every animal object to her was an animal object of animal fear, and even the most unambitious and non-threatening creatures got her up on tiptoes: the heat-struck flying ants who could not lift off from the terracotta “crazy paving”; the carp who could not advance from our neighbour’s bowl; the garden snails plotting unhurried surprises, hiding somehow between the complicit legs of eerily table-clothed tables.

Because animals in every possible universe my mother could imagine, even those mirrored in paintings, were very much animals webbed in a never-ending devil-waltz of infernal inflection, of almost sacramental mystery, and, as she wrote in her final Christmas news bulletin, animals called to her soundlessly, with reliability, even among the cratered ruins of her sleeplessness.

This is why she neither ate nor wore anything from any animal: not because of any moral, vegan-type imperative, but rather because a fearful and totalising respect caused her to act out of a Biblical thundercloud understanding of the word awesome, based entirely on a terrorising rule which obliged her to recoil as much from a satirical wall-stencil of a chimpanzee as from a real-life heifer, cantering and pregnant, there in that distant and June-day meadowland.

And this meant she was always prey to some unpredictable ambush (and, yes, ambushes can be predictable, Michael: as my appointed counsellor, you should know that — or how about ask your interventionist pal, the so-called parole-board physician?).

So mother would immediately button off her favourite serial-killer series if a bewildered wood-pigeon (Columba palumbus) flew into shot (a directorial choice, I suspect, designed to symbolise the gory-clipped innocence of one of the murderer’s frivolous victims), and when an “authentic”, “disorientated” “wood-pigeon” (spoiler alert: a Columba livia) fussed into my mother’s bedroom and alighted satirically atop the television unit itself, after fraudulently beaking through the inherited cat-flap we would never use, my mother ran, barefoot, out of the house, onto the street, and clean across the golf course she must have known was metastatic with dozens of moles, eventually performing a five-thousand metre circuit which showed nicely how one escape could lead to yet another trap.

Then she returned to us, hours later, claiming she had simply been “training”.

The bird, a homing breed later identified by microchip as belonging to one of my stepfather’s colleagues, seemed very much to know its job was to perch like that as my mother tried to understand a fictionalised atrocity in a faraway land she would never visit, and which was, paradoxically, bristling with labyrinths of unknown fauna.

My mother crossed every field to avoid every smug barbered spaniel, every birthday puppet of a “giraffe”, every young graduate whose demeanour and DNA reminded her of a gecko (you would be stunned to count how many youths resemble ectotherms).

Pyjamas and T-shirts in my childhood were never patched with banjo-strumming weasels or motor-racing piglets or line-dancing toads, and I never once owned a toy animal, such as the jovial panda my best friend, REDACTED NAME, used as a pillow, except of course for the “leopard” I had to keep entombed in my bureau drawer under a folded stack of cotton handkerchiefs, unless my mother was working out a new shopping-centre design in her extremely insulated garden office, which is when I could take out the “leopard” and talk quite freely about what had happened in the play-park again.

Well, but can you imagine, Carlito, my stepfather would begin the Saturday evening bedtime story, a diminishing flute of Moritz pilsner to hand, after I had made some innocent comment about my mother weeping about the tortoise on a neighbour’s balcony, can you imagine hiding on the lowest branch of a rheumatic old tree in a new-moon forest while leopards hide below you, Carlito, waiting for you to fall asleep and tumble, and I don’t say this to scare you, but it’s so they can start to get your flesh off your head, to feast on your spinal column, down there in the hellish green?

So yes I do totally understand why a nervous weakling sort of person might be scared of a fearless sewer rat, experimentally starved and aiming directly for one’s breakfast bowl, say, or a wheezing badger coolly assessing the rear-door of your clifftop holiday caravan, or a slipper-nesting black widow, or a shadow in the shallow end, or even a fledgling one-eyed barn-owl, especially if said owl has a habit of appearing uninvited and quite without warning on your bedside basket when you turn on the red-lamp.

But an apparently normal squirrel?

Nutting under a distant spruce?

When you are sitting inside a moving bus four lanes of traffic eastward?

No, I’m pushing the bell to remind you to move, driver; I actually don’t need to get off now.

I remember my mother, who had a borderline-pro chess rating and the imperious air of distraction you might associate with such a rating, once refusing to look at a pencil drawing of a cart-horse I had completed in the final month of my home-schooled primary school career.

I’d been rather proud of the sketch, not least because the cart horse wore a panama hat and smiled, if horses can, and the cart it was supposed to be hauling had become detached on a paperclip bend and toppled down the crumbling hem of a Tuscan bluff, killing all the ducklings it had been taking to market (I portrayed the ducklings as not smiling), but when I eagerly held my sheet of A3 to greet her bedside at five o’clock in the morning, my mother put her great bony hands over her eyes, making a type of bone cage, a lattice of bishops and queens, and turned to the wall saying, that is so nice, Carl, what an item and can you please go and put your … item … in your special private drawer to keep it nice and safe now and let’s not waste any more time.

Notice, for future reference, how that incident, and the fact my mother was an award-winning shopping-centre architect, did not prevent me from becoming the award-winning graphic designer I still am today, despite what happened (maybe because I am no dupe).

Forest-dwelling, yard-bound, spatchcocked, dawdling, very close, on a map, fantastical, dream-dwelling, abstract in the forms of cuboids and maths puzzles, animals made of vapour or oat-milk patterns in the coffee mug: my mother respectfully loathed them all, Michael, and found ways to avoid and or counter-attack any bestial encounter or engagement.

To this day I have no inkling how my mother tolerated the clearly horse-derived, although hardly horse-realistic, chess knight; my hypothesis is that she simply pretended those four pieces were not animalistic, disguising a phobia with a delusion.

Although “loathing” isn’t quite right either, even with the respectful qualifier; it was more like humility in the face of an inhuman reality; it was like she tried to prevent herself being caught out by surprises by enjoying surprises being inflicted on other people, including her only (as far I knew then and can ever know) child.

And I’m not saying she was a common conspiracy connoisseur either.

After all, it was Angel, my Catalonia-nostalgic stepfather, who was ultimately responsible for the majority of the practical plotting and execution of the pranks/jokes/attacks, although he cannot take one hundred per cent of the blame, which is why we are here, obviously, talking about the biggest joke/prank/attack (or maybe that should be biggest “endgame”).

Which is where, I suppose, I should really try at least to explain again, because I know you think repetition in these emails is somehow useful, how as a child and teenager and young adult I always used to prepare for the big day, in the sense that preparation is even the appropriate concept in this context.

As you know, I start (maybe that should be “started” or “used to start”) preparing in a concerted and conscious manner for the big day at least six weeks in advance, and the first procedural tick-box (I tessellate those square yellow “sticking notes” which are sold in cubes at most stationary shops or online) is simply to run through the breakdowns of all the events from big days gone by, because although certain pranks/jokes/attacks can and are repeated (the human mind having only so many droplets of hell through which to refract its mischievous distraction from the crematorium smell), experience forces me to know that the universe and all its loveless evolved jesters (maybe that should be its “manifest jesters”) like to mix it up in an awesome way, here using “awesome” not as modern Americans do.

As my drawing tutor used to say maybe too often: awesome once meant an experience so uncategorisably beyond subjective reality that you might well loosen your bladder and or die.

So if last year it was something banal, like a bucket of red-dyed pond-run-off calibrated on the semi-closed pantry door, or a trio of defrocked sex-workers handcuffed to the laundry window grille, mouthing obscene prayers, then this year it might be something more elaborate, perhaps involving a long-game set-up with sham Andorran bank accounts and thespians dressed as border cops knocking on the midnight patio doors.

But then you have to remember all the other pranks/jokes/attacks you (the impersonal you; the one; not you, Michael) have directly witnessed or have credible confirmation of or simply know about.

Yes, they sure do like to “mix it up”, the people or groups who set up such experiments, such frauds, such murderous violations.

Fake phone calls, fake letters, fake walls, fake shoes.

The terrorist missile strike is due to occur in approximately fifteen minutes. Take immediate cover.

Fake dead relatives, fake cancer scares, bogus hurricane warnings.

Unfortunately we have detected an irredeemable anomaly in your savings account.

Long game, short game.

Lies dressed up as obvious truths.

Turtles with timebombs gaffer-taped to their shells in the railway waiting-hall on your way home from the tearful judo tournament.

We are extremely sorry to have to inform you that your mother and stepfather have been killed in a small avalanche.

Drownings, kidnappings, amputations, arrests, live radio phone-in call-backs.

The attached blood analysis shows certain irregularities of potential live-limiting concern; please report to the outpatient clinic at the earliest opportunity with the following access codes.

And all of these unamusing assaults I now conclude happened to me because of my mother’s terror of animals, a terror whose birth, she claimed, can be traced to the time when a wild cat, “possibly a lynx hybrid”, vaulted through the opened window of a rural taxi-van on the balmy April morning of her beloved grandfather’s funeral, the feline landing on my mother’s four-year-old chest and then proceeding to jab at her forehead and protective arms with a type of intentionality and determination not entirely rational in the context (I inferred from the mime).

My mother then asked me if I had never wondered what this scar was all about now.

But the really odd thing, she added, was that her mother had also been clawed about the face by a wild cat.

Wait: also in a rural taxi-van, window ajar?

Don’t be silly.

Whatever the reasons, I have told you how I start preparing for the big day six weeks in advance, and now that I think about that, that claim is a lie.

Or if it’s not a lie, Michael, then maybe it’s what the poet might call a gesture of the light, because the reality, and now the bitter irony, is that I never stop preparing for the big day.

I never stop.

Never.

Absolutely never.

How could you?

Sometimes I think preparing for the big day is all I think about, in the same way that the next drink is all an alcoholic thinks about (it isn’t all the alcoholic thinks about, that would be neurologically profound, but the next-drink-thinking colours every thought and is repetitive and impossible to ignore and influences most other thoughts; that is the nature of addiction or obsession in general, as you well know).

When my stepfather was in the final weeks of dying of ethanol-caused liver disease, he asked me to smuggle a lucky bottle of English Indian Pale Ale into the hospital renal ward.

It was his bad luck to make this request when the younger me was in the wallowing trough of a self-righteous adolescent phase, somewhat manic and single-mindedly pursuing every art contest in the region, never taking even a consolation rosette, and so I told my stepfather, whose real name was Joan, that I most certainly could not bring him the EIPA on account of the fact it was the EIPA which had got him lying there, sepia-skinned on the ultimate launchpad.

But now I ask myself if there were other reasons not connected directly with my fizzing, prize-obsessed, self-righteous adolescent phase which led me to refuse his deathbed request for a simple glass of beer.

He told me not to worry. He possibly understood why I couldn’t bring the ale, looking me dead in the eye for the first time in years. It was the last time he looked me dead in the eye and I was shocked he was so forgiving. A moment later, looking myself dead in the eye in a horrifying hospital lavatory mirror, I was asking why Joan or Angel had been so understanding. I came later to remember this moment as having some force of revelatory power.

So let’s say in October, about as far away from April first as you can travel, if you think of the calendar as an orbit around a black hole, I am very much preparing for the big day, running through the lists of previous jokes/pranks/ attacks I have searched for in the archive. Jokes people have told me about. Jokes I have seen memetically or during films, or procedures I have simply imagined but of which I have no direct experience. I used October as an example to guide you, but I am preparing for the big day on every day of what we call a year. (Back in Spain, my stepfather told me people “enjoy” a day of pranks on December 28, not April 1, but to my knowledge he never observed the Iberian big day once he had emigrated here).

But it’s not as simple as just thinking about all the possible jokes/attacks/pranks.

That would be like saying an intelligence officer with MI6 prepares for a terrorist attack just by “thinking” about all the possible attacks. Like the officer just sits in that gateau next to the Thames and closes the eyes, maybe adopts a Zen posture, and just kind of tries to imagine all the bombings and germ releases and ways to lodge sticks deep into the spokes of the state.

It’s like saying a hawk scores a mouse by hovering over the cut field with its eyes shut before dropping at speed onto the potential meal at random.

In terms of preparation for the day after the final day of March, it’s way more complicated than that.

You need a wide and deep network of information sources and these sources need to be analysed, is the nutshell. It’s more tangled than love. It’s like being aware of every micrometre of your own nervous system. You need forecasts of unexpected events. Modelling. Imagination. You need competence and cross-checks. Lenses. Spiritual advice. You need to know how time works, how clocks are not time, how grit fucks up a mechanism.

And, sometimes, you need a snitch or a thumb-screwed lifer, a leaky corridor or a swap. A payment. An accident framed in a kaleidoscope.

Sometimes “you” plan a set-up for years and even then the pay-off might either outright fail or just be lacklustre.

My mother once locked herself in a roadside café lavatory for an hour when a man with a falcon on a massive leather glove parked next to our caravan.

You’re adopted.

I only want to make the point that I don’t want you to imagine me going about my daily life thinking I think that only to run through a list of jokes is what I think is preparing for thinking about the big day. That is just not what I think and I want that to be clear before I explain what happened at the first and only so-called dancing class I attended, Michael, and which is rather different than what was “reported” “in the news” and “on social media”.

I also don’t want you to think I am practising psychiatry without a licence (I do, as the court heard, practise tree surgery without a licence: that is my second job, the designing being highly prestigious and yet for me inconsistently remunerated, and I make no apologies for that because I am perhaps the best or second-best tree surgeon within a 120-kilometre radius of my home, prove me wrong).

I am simply making an assessment of how I approach this type of planning without fear in my blood; I was once chased clear off a mountain by one angry wasp, the grass hissing its blade on blade like a gargantuan violin, but I did not inherit my mother’s generalised terror of animals.

Although the question of preparing for the big day is nothing directly to do with animals, per se.

Animals might of course be included in any given joke/attack/prank, but they are not an essential element in the preparation. Angel/Joan/my stepfather was not averse to visiting the pet shop in the dog days of March, but not every year (and even now, decades later, the words “spring equinox” cause a sad odour of caged fur and rabbit excrement to alchemise inside my nostrils).

So it has taken me a few pars of throat-clearing and background framing in order to get to the main reason why we are here today, and why that shadow has filled that doorway, and why you are poised to immediately respond by email from your office, I think you call it an office, to me, here in this place.

First off, I have to say very clearly that I did not start the beginner’s dancing course at 19:30 on March 31, 2022, in order to meet women, if that’s what you’re thinking, and I know it is what you are thinking, based on some quite inappropriate sidebar offside comments you have made during our more formal face-to-face interviews, when that was still allowed.

I did not matriculate for the dancing course in order to meet women; let’s just leave it at that for now.

I did not and there is no proof that I did.

I had been told by a certain person whose name is not relevant that dancing was not only superb exercise for your entire body, including, this person intoned, rather creepily, “the amazing skeleton inside us”, but could also lead to states of profound emotional calm and spiritual transcendence. As you know I am not what any sane person with eyes and a sense of touch would call an athlete, but I have always enjoyed dancing secretly to certain types of pop music, especially the song Walk Like an Egyptian by the American pop-rock quartet known as The Bangles.

This certain person, who was talking highly of dancing as a cure-all, even shimmered weblike herself when telling me about her hypothesis, which would have seemed much more believable to me if she had not shimmered in that way as I lay on a stretcher in her treatment room; the shimmering, id est, was an obvious clue she was peddling placebos.

Now that I can no longer swim, for reasons which are not pertinent, this comment (maybe that should be “claim” or “testable hypothesis”) about dancing rented a small room in the Carl Mind Hotel and about three years later, one day in February, the month which only has one “barrier month” between itself and the big day, I enrolled weeks in advance, as recommended on the poster, for the General Dancing Course at the local leisure-centre, not to meet women or because I knew I could win trophies or medals for dancing, or earn cash or social credits, but rather because I was, I am embarrassed to admit, looking for a cure for despair, and I think that is both justification enough, and inexplicable, and something I do not want to talk about.

The course details as outlined on the advertisement seemed deliberately obscure, if not mysterious, or even misleading, and only revealed the following information: the times of the classes, which were every Thursday between 19:15 and 21:05; the first names of the teachers, Guy and Melissa; and the fact the course was (recklessly, absurdly) open to BEGINNERS AND EXPERTS ALIKE.

This information was displayed in blue shouting letters in front of a picture of four naked feet, feet one assumed were captured (maybe that should be “captivated”) in the art of dancing. The dance being done by those feet would probably be a Tango, unless it was a mocked-up photograph and they were actor feet. I don’t know. There was no information about what type of dancing would be practised during the course, nor if any ratio of men to women would be significant nor if it was more suitable for couples, single people, or both or neither, nor if medals or trophies would be involved.

Do I need to state that no non-human animals would be in attendance?

I’m not making any kind of point there, BTW, about men and women, or what quota ratio would mean what to me, only that some dances have certain traditional roles and men tend to have longer bones and bigger muscles than women; in that way we are no different to many other mammals, bred or natural. As I say, I didn’t join the course to meet women, or to get interested in ratios or quotas, or to dig up the past, in any case. When I arrived for the first evening of the course, having not eaten my usual 19:10 supper to avoid getting what runners call “a stitch”, I was neither surprised nor not surprised to see I was the only male adult in attendance in a waiting-room among what I counted to be twenty-nine adult females, some of whom were too small to ride the rollercoaster.

As I was signing a register of some type, a woman of approximately normal height introduced herself to me as “Sally”, ignoring the fact I was trying to invent an email address and phone number and postal address and date of birth and reason for being there and was in no sensible position to engage in conversation with a stranger in such a socially-strained leisure-centre foyer context, with the smell of rubberised flooring and sweaty polyester and budget deodorant underarm spray, and then she started talking to me about how she had spent year on year learning what she called “Russian ballet”, when all she really longed “to do” was flamenco, and she really liked what she weirdly called my “retro tracksuit”. And when I told her, sorry, I genuinely had no interest whatsoever in dancing and I was really only joining the course for basic physical exercise reasons, of course not letting on anything about my conversation with a medic who as the minutes passed seemed like more and more of a lunatic, nor mentioning my desire for a cure or the fact I could no longer swim for reasons which were and are not pertinent, doing some basic dynamic leg-stretches as I spoke to her, the type of guideline movements I had discovered were comfortable for all pre-dance routines at all levels of competence, keeping my mind on the potential for what runners call a stitch, “Sally” announced to me that she “hated fucking ballet” and was only joining the class to “meet men”, and then “Sally” knuckled me in the bicep and told me she was “only joking” and this was “obviously not the place to meet a man”.

I did not really see how her dots joined up to make a sound picture of this reality, in that foyer in that moment, tempted to consider her a badly-prepared prank stooge, but I had no time to seek clarification, because Guy and Melissa had started clapping their hands and yelling us into the gymnasium.

Form a human circle, people. The circle which has no end and which has no beginning, Guy shouted.

The snake which is eating its own tail, Melissa shouted.

We made a human circle, with our teachers standing back-to-back in the centre, keeping time with claps using their human hands as the sun hit the plastic mandala patterns on the walls.

This function room at the leisure centre thirty-five years ago when I was thirty-five smelled of flowery perfume, skin, cosmetic powder, leathery shoes, trapped plaster dust, and chalk, and the floor was glossy parquet.

I thought it was sad that my only memory of my final year of primary school was the drawing of the cart horse and its accident.

You were born a twin but your twin was stillborn.

Her name was Sarah.

Now, this is where, in our previous correspondence, you have suggested (maybe that should be “implied”) that perhaps because I was “distracted” by dancing or women or “women and dancing”, that, in a “state of flow”, somehow looking for a cure for despair, perhaps I stopped preparing for the big day.

I can only say that that is nonsense.

Absolute fool’s-gold-plated nonsense.

I have already told you and do not want to have to tell you again that I never stop preparing for the big day, even right now, as I type this email.

I have been in numerous stressing environments, drawing exams and French hypermarkets for example, and have never stopped preparing for the big day.

And I was not off-guard when Guy then shouted at us to stay in the human circle and to also hold hands and to start walking slowly anti-clockwise.

We are a whirlpool, Melissa shouted, pain forming itself into a familiar rictus in my diaphragm, as we shuffled.

I want you to feel the energy of this moment, this movement, this glorious whirlpool. Dancing is about the energy of a moment in time, friends, Guy shouted, a joyful human moment. Dancing is about joy, not technique. It is about being grateful for these bodies, this breath, this life.

I had five minutes previously, as soon as Guy opened his goat mouth, decided this would be my first and final dancing class.

I was going to withdraw my matriculation document as soon as I returned home and demand a refund. I even planned to cross out my personal information in the register, but never got the chance.

Looking at Guy and Melissa, and the embarrassed respect sparkling in the eyes of the other adults in the shuffle-whirlpool of wildly-varying heights, only one word came to mind and I am not going to say that word. But then the most extraordinary thing happened, which I will come back to in a moment, stepping out of the whirlpool for a moment, because I do not want to continue the correspondence with the possibility in the back of my mind that there is a possibility in the back of your mind that my mother also hated human beings, who are also animals.

No, not at all.

She did not.

My mother, as well as having a chess rating in a good year of 2,000, was a solid humanitarian.

She loved our species, for all its faults.

She even loved my stepfather and he had so many faults he was at root an active earthquake zone.

I know she even loved me and I think regretted the fact that her fear of animals had had what she thought was somewhat negative “impact” on me, as it would on any child, especially one who early on realised he had a great affinity for all living things, be they Labradors or oak trees or bacteria on the microscope slide.

Even when my mother had combed the weird curled hair she was so careful about and straightened the expensive blouses she complained so much about and tried to tell me that not all the things I thought were living were living (I think she used the example of “weather”), I retained a doubt that life, if life is the word, could only be substantiated in the world of biology or physics.

My mother also tried to school me about something she called “strategy”, especially the day I told her I wanted to be a vet, and she schooled me about the danger of getting locked into one plan at the expense of noticing that an opponent (AKA the universe) was lining up to take your queen and block your king in a death spiral. This was her version, I suppose, of “look both ways before you cross the road” or “do not get in a fancy car with a sexual pervert”.

We had that conversation in April 1997, a few days after my stepfather had taken all the handles off the doors in the house before my mother and I woke up on the big day.

He seemed to think it was amusing that he had re-attached all the handles before we returned home from school and work in the late afternoon as he pretended we had imagined the whole thing: why would he stoop to such low-hanging cliché pranks, even though it was the big day?

And, returning to the leisure centre, what is the one thing you know about a whirlpool?

One of the things you might know if you know one thing about a whirlpool is that they are not great places to go swimming, or dancing.

The second thing you might know is that the whirlpool appears to be the same whirlpool but it is constantly changing as water whirls in and out of the pool.

Now, I do not buy absurd coincidences in stories if they are in fiction, but I have to buy them when they happen in my own life, and the simple (maybe that should be “sample”) fact is that I, only thirteen years before that first dancing class, had had a rather formative experience while trying to breaststroke in a whirlpool.

I am not going to tell you the date of that experience, which knights or bishops might have prevented the shock, and the date which might not even be significant, which might be another coincidence, which might be another way in which the coincidence is proven or not proven (I mean me mentioning this in our correspondence, Michael, might be doing that).

As I said, I had firmly decided I was going to withdraw my dancing course matriculation document, delete my false name from the register, and demand a full refund (maybe that should be “money refund”, for how could they refund the time I had wasted?) and I was going to do so in a very courteous and concise message, spellchecked and grammar-proofed and read out loud to detect and hopefully extract any unintentional sarcasm or offensive vocabulary.

I already knew, during the whirlpool practise, that this dancing course was neither going to be a good source of physical regeneration, nor a rain-well of spiritual renewal (you can fall in a rain-well and become trapped, especially if the rain-well has a conical shape, getting wider towards the top as they cruelly tend to; you can also install a dressed and wigged shop dummy inside a rain-well and, the following day, suggest to your seven-year-old son that he might want to take a look down there, to check for frogs).

But I was soon proven quite wrong about what I already knew about the dancing course.

Before I continue, let me remind you that the year my mother tumbled on the ice outside the railway station one Friday morning on her way to collect coloured pencils for the weekend diagrams, my stepfather glued my breakfast equipment to the kitchen table. The next year he substituted the sugar I used for my porridge with salt, his not realising that salt is a quite acceptable flavouring enhancement for porridge, and is indeed normal as such “in Scotland”, only adding to his amusement for some reason which even now escapes me. The year after that, my mother decided to play her first prank on the big day and it did not go well; although deciding to paint my beloved tricycle with honey was obviously something my stepfather might have suggested, and I do not know for sure he did suggest it, although of course I had listened at their bedroom door as much as possible throughout the year and especially in the weeks before the big day, my mother was quite unprepared for the vibrant gamut of wild and domestic animals attracted to the honey when she opened the side door to try to go to work.

Recall: rooms full of helium balloons; rewired electric switches; rubber rats; deflated tricycle tyres; emoticons carved on apples hanging on the tree; horse dung in the winter slipper; firecrackers at four o’clock in the morning, in the bathroom; fake tattoos of swastikas; suitcases full of banknotes and a moonlit dash to the border; this is your baby sister, she did not die; cushions stuffed with rocks.

We are calling from The Times for your comment about your arrest last night.

You are not adopted.

Melissa called the whirlpool to a halt and said, I want to say a special thank you for the only man to join us here tonight! Brave and noble and very welcome! A round of applause!

Guy, who had a penis clearly delineated in his horrifying elastic trousers, did not correct Melissa, and instead joined in the applause which seemed to go on for at least a minute, as we all stood in a soul-decreasing circle, holding hands.

As a special acknowledgement of all you for being so brave in coming out here tonight to try something new, I want to offer everyone a free drink, Guy shouted.

There was no need to shout; we were all listening attentively.

There was also no need to emphasise the fact we would not be “paying” for these drinks; they had, of course, calculated the cost of these drinks within the total matriculation fee.

As I had already decided to demand a complete “money refund”, I could not in good conscience take a drink.

But before I could walk backwards to the fire door, Guy gestured towards a long table in the corner of the room which I had not noticed before, on which were arranged various bottles of sugary beverages, wine, and water, as well as a Pisa tower of plastic beakers.

Your first thought, naturally, is that the liquids inside those bottles are laxative syrups or olive oils, or urine.

Your second thought, equally naturally, is that when Melissa goes to make the first “cocktail”, to “celebrate” the start of the general dancing course, the liquids involved will combine to create a small explosion.

The “snacks” in plastic bowls, we are led to believe, are “pistachio nuts” and “tortilla chips”.

You are cordially invited next week to join the audience of our new cookery contest programme: IN A PICKLE.

Looking now at the cheerful festive table, I thought of my mother´s coffin.

(Her will and testament had been simple: she left the house to me and all her belongings, including every item inside the house, to twenty-six different charities, each with an office in a different nation, on all the planet’s continents, and I would only be allowed to live in the house and take ownership of it once I had adequately distributed all her belongings to these charities, a task which would be monitored by a person labelled in her will as “the master”, and a person I was not allowed to meet or know the name of, and who would visit the house when I was confirmed by a video call in a known location, outside the town hall, for example, and not about to appear in the house and “blow their cover”. Once this procedure was completed, the house of course was peeled back to brick and floorboards (I had, for reasons of security and peace of mind, stored my meagre belongings, mostly pencils and saws, temporarily in a dockside crate)).

Perhaps the whirlpool dancing had disinhibited me in some way, as I know it does in certain ceremonials or cult-recruiting rites, because I almost, for first time in my life, did not care that the drinking cups were probably all glued together, or that the nuts were probably made of soap, or that a Belgian seaside clown with a plastic machine-gun was going to prance through the curtains on the stage at one end of the function room and target us with foam ammunition.

Suddenly, and quite horribly, against my will, I genuinely wanted to enjoy a lemonade and a handful of almonds.

Many years later, perhaps I can admit I had been hypnotised by the very essence of infinite evil, just like all those Germans in the 1930s.

Guy and Melissa stood behind us, clapping us towards the trestle table, goggle-eyed, loose-backed.

After the break we are going to show some of the more formal aspects of traditional dance, they shouted in unison, making a horrible Venn diagram yell, or something like that; I didn’t take a shorthand note.

(Before she went to Geneva to take her own life at the clinic, alone and burning all documentation of the event, I never asked my mother if she wanted to somehow escape from, or take the teeth from, her fear of non-human animals. I assumed her terror was just as much a part of her life as her own limbs and could never be avoided. What I realise now, Michael, after the events of that first dancing class, is that her terror was a perfect catalyst for my endless preparations for the big day; her ongoing terror acted as a constant, almost godlike, reminder of what could be about to happen, of the unlikely feline who could whip its claws across your hopeful unmasked chops at any moment. And I think that without my mother’s fear of animals I would never have become so expert in planning for the big day. In addition, there was one section of my mother’s last will and testament which I was not permitted to know about; only the master could see it. I assumed, given my mother’s embarrassing (to her) love affair with an Irish grandmaster during a chess contest in her youth, that this section was somehow related to him (I know they continued to correspond, in code, using postcards) or it was related to him and the chess world in general, because I had once, as a confused teenager, told her that I absolutely loathed chess and I absolutely hated her playing chess and what about the little fucking horses then. She was not amused by these comments, to say the least, and never mentioned chess in my presence for the remaining thirty-three years of her life. But I know she played in secret and Sean never stopped sending his postcards from County Kildare. But I am not stupid enough, nor deluded enough, to claim I was one hundred per cent certain that these fragments of our shared history had recombined to form the secret elements of my mother’s last will and testament).

Of course I gestured courteously to all the alleged dancers to go ahead of me at the big table but they all insisted I “go first” and one woman even handed me a dented plastic plate and a cup and told me to “dig in”.

At this point my disinhibition just vanished and I was as certain as certain could be that something was about to befall me, even though this was not the big day.

Many times I have simply given in to the prank/joke/attack, knowing that resistance actually makes the experience worse.

As I have mentioned already, the date of the first evening of the beginner’s dancing class was March 31 and although I work from home, and so do not have certain institutional routines to keep me strictly in line with the days of the week, I do keep a traditional paper desktop calendar in my shed, and I religiously tear off the days at 07:30, when I sit down with my pills to review my projects for the coming day.

The morning of the first evening of the dancing class I had torn off “MARCH 30: Feast day of St Peter Regulatus, known to levitate” and I know how many days there are in March and I know this calendar is not a joke/prank/attack calendar.

Nobody else could have been in the house; only my mother and stepfather had keys and they were in my pocket.

(My stepfather’s body was sent back to Spain to be installed in his family crypt and I was not allowed to attend the ceremony “for religious reasons”).

One of the pearls I have gleaned over the years is that prankers take greater delight in a prankee who is made angry than a prankee who is made amused. As a result I have trained myself to adopt a poise of calm amusement or wise detachment in response to pranks/jokes/attacks, to never allow my natural aversion to such idiocies, let alone seen-it-all-before-ness, to manifest itself on my face, in my body language, or in my speech. This ability has not always served me well in social situations and I think it is one of the reasons I have remained a bachelor until advanced maturity.

So, as we stood at the trestle table and I told myself that the big red velvet curtains on the stage had not just wobbled a fraction, I turned to the dancing pupils, and to Guy and Melissa, who were every now and then bellowing nonsense about dancing, and showed them all my teeth.

They did not seem to quite expect that, I could ascertain from their response, but they continued to encourage me to enjoy a snack, as if I was a complete novice and had no clue how such set-ups conclude.

In short, Michael, selfishly, I played along, shield up, knowing that would be easier for me.

First, I poured myself a plastic mug of “lemonade”, calculating I would need to deduct a certain amount from the full money refund I was going to demand later that night.

Next, I scooped up a palmful of “mixed nuts” and again calculated how much they would cost me.

And then I turned to the stage and said, okay you can come out now.

The dancing pupils and Melissa and Guy made a lot of fake puzzled expressions, pretending that “nothing was going on”, and “he thinks we have a special guest” comments, as all participants in such a game must, for their twisting enjoyment to be maximised.

At this point I decided to move my rook into an unusual, but tried and tested, position, by saying in a sincere tone of voice that my mother had died a few weeks ago, in fact had taken her own life at a euthanasia clinic in Geneva, and I was feeling especially emotionally fragile and vulnerable to even the slightest shock, and in fact only last week my doctor had told me I must avoid all stress and unpredictable situations, weeks after advising me to start this dancing course, and I never usually reacted like this, I am a polite person, really, and shy, and I know you all think this is the first time this has happened to me, but it so is not.

I smelled the “lemonade” and it smelled of lemonade but there was no way I was going to drink it; fast-acting laxatives can be manufactured to be entirely odourless.

The “refreshments” table was covered in a bedsheet-like white cloth all the way down to the sprung gymnasium floor on all four sides.

And if you saw that arrangement, you would easily be able to suggest, without a moment’s hesitation, as someone who is now also constantly planning for the big day, that two people you know more than anyone else in the world could easily be shrouded under that table, easily and freely and temporarily resurrected.

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Praetendent (1939) by Paul Klee.