I do agree with you on many of the non-Doyle things e.g.. I doubt if he’d forget where he lived (unless he actually wanted to forget) and the author is still making him far too wimpy and weepy in this chapter which he really isn’t. But I do feel it’s possible that the trauma (one perhaps which bordered on a nervous breakdown?) he suffered where everything in his life had changed or ended and was associated with extreme violence, could have led to the position where he just couldn’t bear to go back there and that included seeing his mum again, especially when, until recently, he thought that his father was still alive. And his mum has let him down on two basic and fundamental levels: failure to protect him in the family home and failure to accept his homosexuality. And fanon Doyle (and Bodie) seems pretty insular in a family sense e.g. when he endures a near death experience it's Bodie and Cowley who are at his bedside, not family members, and it's Bodie who takes him home from hospital.

And maybe Gabe's care of Doyle is just him reverting to type, caring for people is how he earns his daily bread and butter and what he does well *and* he does actually care a lot for Doyle. Yes, maybe he shouldn't treat Doyle like a child and I'm not sure why the author's written it that way.... perhaps it's what we all do when we care for people? Kind of infantasize (? is that a word?) things a bit in order for the care to be less embarrassing, more easy to give and receive as you would do with a child? Who knows? The author's writing style is strange in that most of it is really good but then, sometimes, she lets herself down and writes the main very tough characters in an unrealistic, unrecognisable way.