His birth-name is Clifton and thirty years later he is still what Asha thinks of as foetal, just huger. All day he hunches over his laptop in the granny flat. Most days he says nothing, does nothing, doesn’t work, wants money, only grudgingly appears to perform house duties (when he wants money). He says everyone else is a complete shit or a spy or an uncool loser and no one is worth his attention. The physical symptoms of his malaise are a cough, the RSI, and his broken neck, none of them convincing, yet they gained him sick leave from the government mailroom where he had worked doing the same clerical and mail-sorting job for years. He read Charles Bukowski. No career plan rose in front of him and his only value was exactly that: doing the same work, of least resistance, for low pay and never complaining to the union. Then retiring.

Too easy to say he is introverted. More like arrested motion.

The mail-sorting job demanded hours of standing and carrying. Now he is turning to lard.

The sick leave is all spent (or is it in the bank?) and his leave without pay has expired, he is a free man. That is to say, he is now a drag on the time and patience and, crucially, the finances of his parents.

And drag is apt, after Bukowski he saw himself as a late-era Beat, a poet called John who wanted to be Jack, as in Kerouac, he called his parents man and said things are cool and claimed always to need more bread. He thought if Jack Kerouac could live at home and keep typing reels of prose onto the floor, then why couldn’t he? Without the writing of course. He wanted more bread, man, all the time money, her money, because working for money was not only uncool, it was a drag. If he could avoid it he would. All that stuff was such a drag, man.

For a while his stepmother called him Drag-Man. She coined it with a mixture of exasperation and pleasure. Yes. She had resorted to name-shame. But fancy calling her man. He is a fantasist. She and Leach often discuss Clifton and his parasitic ways. Keeping the father up to date, as it were. Leach addresses his son Clifton as Cliff. The boy who fell over himself.

Clifton stopped using the last-century Beat vernacular. She hasn’t asked why. But he told her recently there was a graphic novel character who gained special powers if and only if he dressed in women’s clothing. She asked him what he meant. He said it was a game. Then he said he might write something, maybe even a book about it. Was this another of his fantasies? Or something else?

She had once suggested an away-from-home ‘hobby’. Not writing. Not taking on roles. Away-from-home in real terms, meaning developing independence, self-respect. It might also lead to … employment. Before her knee op she would pace across the floor like a patient. And berate the furniture. And worry about him.

Now that he’s home and free his symptoms show bipolar tendencies, the low risk, low esteem type. His up-moods manifest as talking-without-listening and presumptions of achievement, leading to flights of delusion. Harmless enough if you discount the loss of potential.

His face is grey, his hair is lank, his weight goes sideways. Endomorph. He imagines he is a charmer but when he talks he effects a superior tone as if other people are fools. He won’t contact Centrelink, he won’t look for work, he won’t see a GP because why should he, there is nothing wrong with him, he won’t make small talk, except to complain. Now that he is free to.

One day his harmless tag slipped.

The backyard boasts only the single fruit tree Leach was left clinging to (having his Biblical moment, the same neighbour said) because the space is occupied by the granny flat Clifton hibernates in. Made of agreeably un-rendered brick and featuring a neat Colorbond roof, this dwelling is outside the public view. With a door leading onto the back lane, he is independent, he can wander in and out of his own free will.

But he loves cats and cats love him. The Universe holds strange surprises. Cats gather at his granny flat and entertain him with their idiosyncratic ways.

His version of himself is different. Two years earlier while still employed in the mailroom at Uni he had slipped on the kerb. One minute he was watching the truck pull away with a mail pick-up, next he had fallen onto the pavement. He claimed. Only he saw himself, as it were, within his inner truth, fall … When Asha asked him to see the local GP he refused to go anywhere near him. Until he realised it was a work injury and then it was very real. He went several times, to place in his supervisor’s hand emphatic proof (his own and the GP’s) of neck injury.

Job done. He knew what was wrong – his neck was slightly broken. His right forearm had RSI. He left work on sick leave. Nothing of his personal activities went undone, or unattended, or left to chance or his disadvantage, no, he was rigorous in his self-interest, nothing was real if he didn’t accept it. Since no doctors could face the mystery of his broken neck he never consulted them again.

He wasn’t a friendly boy and Asha claimed her restraint as step-mum was normal, never soppy, which some mums claimed as the better proof of love. There was always an air of the stern about her, but at least she was not controlling. She didn’t indulge him, she didn’t push him. Just protective. Step-parenting can be tough, she said.

For a shrink this might come across as bad advertising. He thought GPs were worse.

They’re doctors, she said, they know you haven’t ongoing physical injuries. Otherwise you are investing in a worry that is without … substance. I mean, really, Clifton, that really isn’t helping you, it’s pointless.

At very least. And she was worried.

It’s pointless alright, he said, really it is. Listening to you is, I mean.

He continued to wear the neck brace and the sling.

After the sick leave he was allowed leave-on-pay. For longer than anyone could credit. Finally, they had to argue that his injury wasn’t permanent. His refusal to keep medical appointments confirmed it. Or didn’t.

The injury wasn’t permanent. But Clifton was.

Asha tried to convince him to remove the neck brace because it stank, because she could wash it for him and he could then think about why he had kept wearing it. The grime was turning the material black. He did a yes/no. Months would pass before he would take it off, again, for a few hours. Wash, rinse, wring, dry.

(You can’t wear a medical prosthesis on your mind.)

Time passed.

Oh, time passed.

Were he to shake himself into the world more often Clifton would be paranoid – about his father’s devices, the cameras, the algorithms (even the word is worrying, like a parasite of squirm) and how surveillance seems to be changing like the climate, and its accumulations are like CO2, not always visible but out there.

There is much of the nerd in Clifton. Like his father, albeit hugely in-turned. More online and private and possibly sexual, though who can say? No one sees him outside of mealtimes. He is prematurely stooped from the hours spent in front of his screen. There’s something hot and stuffy about him like a fleecy jumper worn so often it gives off a lanolin fug. As much personality in the jumper as in the body underneath it.

Tonight Leach is distracted. Staring at his son over the dinner table he has realised a very serious problem. His son’s face is a dumpling, a pie, a pudding. He is foodstuffs. Leach is looking in a professional sense: like biometrics. And Clifton’s face is like that botched restoration in the church in Borja, Spain, painted by Elías García Martínez and disastrously painted over by 81-year-old Cecilia Giménez. Originally known as Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), now it is dubbed the Monkey-Christ, the hedgehog.

The face is a surface of clay-coloured daubs. Unimaginable daub-and-wipe.

It’s laughable. Dubbing, or painting over, is what his algorithms are said to do. Map in silence a net of lines over every face. But if the original already looks painted-over, as his son’s face does, what is there to map?

Certainly nothing like a soul.