Julie has a tendency to talk past me and her punctuation comes out in diffuse appointment. ‘You don’t take the pills,’ she says. They make me feel like a wrong-thing, I tell her. She doesn’t say anything in an expository way, compelling explanation. Sometimes you burn your tongue and can’t taste anything. If your tastebuds don’t work, flavour has no value. Eventually you only eat because it sustains you, but there’s no pleasure in it, and you think, why should I eat at all? Her face contracts into an exclamatory moue, a useless apostrophe. ‘Your appetite is miserable.’