They don’t believe me. Nobody believes me. I think they’ve forgotten me, left me in this white hell, all alone, like I’m a kid made to think about what I’ve done. All alone, just me, a super-chunky crayon cut blunt so I can’t shove it into my own brain, and a notepad with rounded corners so I can’t slit my wrists. All this just so I can write down what happened and they can read it and laugh over coffee and throw it away and say “What a nut-job.”

Well, here it is. My story. My biography. The tale of how poor Alistair Thorpe wound up in a white padded hell-hole. You won’t believe me. Nobody believes me, I told you that already. I apologise for the handwriting: as I write this I’m rocking back and forth. It’s soothing, like riding a gentle ocean on a lovely little boat beneath a clear blue sky and a sun with a great big cheery smile. God I hope I finish this before they tranq me. Pills in the food, powder dissolved into the drink. And if you don’t eat or drink the stuff, they turn off all the lights and sneak in and jab you with one of those needles they’ve always got and you get all sleepy and bang your ear as you fall and wake up with one hell of a headache. Can you hear the footsteps outside my cell? No, neither can I. It’s not time yet then. Not time yet. I didn’t eat or drink, you see. I pretended, scooping it up then letting it pour down my neck. I’m a nut-job. Spilling more than you eat is in the job description, at the bottom in small print, right alongside being sedated. But hey, what’s a little mess now and again?

Perhaps now I should write my story. Not that you’d believe me anyway. Nobody believes me, I already told you that. Not one person on this planet believes that a knife can talk, that a seven-inch blade with the name “Suzie” scratched onto it can take over your mind. Tell me that seven months ago and I wouldn’t have believed it either. I was a hot-shot author, you see. I had the money, the fast cars, the big hoses. Believe that bullshit and you’ll believe anything. I was an author, and I had my fans, but I didn’t have the fast cars and the big houses full of women in bikinis and big swimming pools and parties. No, I was just the little guy trying to make himself big to scare the bullies. And my word were there bullies.