although she could change him in any way she pleased.
And now Annabel had docketed him securely amongst her things, she began subtly to evacuate herself from the room which had been her whole world, leaving Lee marooned there in miserable isolation.
Now she had two rooms, her unseen world extended its physical boundaries, though it seemed she no longer needed to populate it with as many real objects as before, perhaps because she had impressed her sorrow so deeply on the essential wood and brick of the place she knew for certain nobody could ever be happy there again. She no longer exchanged confidences with the figures on the walls. She did not bother to buy any more furniture or even to fill up the mantelpiece with bunches of leaves and berries from the park stuck into the necks of milk bottles. She lay in bed for hours while Lee was at work, sometimes drawing her pet apocalyptic beasts in her sketchbook but, more and more, merely gazing into space, absorbed in thought. The window remained boarded up and the room was always dark and shady.
Some days she did not get up at all and, if she did, she did not bother to dress or wash but lounged around all day in her nightdress, the very image of mad Ophelia, her disordered hair often caked with watercolour or gobbed with breakfast egg. But now she knew who mad people were and how they behaved, she became a little self-conscious and sometimes she looked like a blurred imitation of her former self. She did not take the drugs which had been prescribed for her and flushed them down the lavatory to conceal this omission from Lee. She kept none of her after-care appointments with the psychiatrist, but took good care to dress herself neatly on certain days of the week, as if she were going to the hospital, and Lee believed her.
Accustomed as he was to dealing with the sick, Lee fed her and cared for her, although, in herself, she seemed much the same as she had always been. Besides, he had few patterns of normal behaviour with which to compare and contrast her ways.
One day, she roused herself sufficiently to go downstairs and put his alarm clock in the dustbin. She said that the tick irritated her. After that, there was no more means of telling the time except for Lee’s wristwatch, so he was often late for work, although the days he passed at the school were scarcely different from the nights he passed at home. Both were barren. He felt as though all his vitality had drained out through the perforations of the needle. Each morning on the stairs, he passed the blonde girl, Joanne, and the swift, fascinated distaste in her glance instantly defined him as a debauched, shameless and abandoned person. Her look made Lee nervous and a little wistful. But she never missed crossing his path on the staircase and he was always aware of her precociously slumberous gaze fixed on his face when he gave her form their weekly lessons on current affairs and political institutions.
Seated at the round table in the bleak middle of a Sunday afternoon, he marked a pile of fifth-form essays on the British Constitution and found, written in a round, childish hand, only the following words on one sheet of paper: ‘They say this is a free country but I am not free in any way so stuff your free country.’ It was difficult to mark Joanne’s essay or to guess at the impulse which prompted it, though he thought she would not have submitted it to any other member of the staff. He scrawled ‘amplify’ at the bottom in red but she did not do so; it seemed the written word was not Joanne’s medium. She had a name for waywardness but Lee paid no attention to staffroom gossip though he noticed in class she was always biting her nails and her nails were brown with nicotine.
An unhappy adolescent will clutch at any straw. Joanne, who was dissatisfied, incorporated her schoolteacher in her own illusory web where, quite unknown to himself and entirely without his consent, he led a busy, active life of
And now Annabel had docketed him securely amongst her things, she began subtly to evacuate herself from the room which had been her whole world, leaving Lee marooned there in miserable isolation.
Now she had two rooms, her unseen world extended its physical boundaries, though it seemed she no longer needed to populate it with as many real objects as before, perhaps because she had impressed her sorrow so deeply on the essential wood and brick of the place she knew for certain nobody could ever be happy there again. She no longer exchanged confidences with the figures on the walls. She did not bother to buy any more furniture or even to fill up the mantelpiece with bunches of leaves and berries from the park stuck into the necks of milk bottles. She lay in bed for hours while Lee was at work, sometimes drawing her pet apocalyptic beasts in her sketchbook but, more and more, merely gazing into space, absorbed in thought. The window remained boarded up and the room was always dark and shady.
Some days she did not get up at all and, if she did, she did not bother to dress or wash but lounged around all day in her nightdress, the very image of mad Ophelia, her disordered hair often caked with watercolour or gobbed with breakfast egg. But now she knew who mad people were and how they behaved, she became a little self-conscious and sometimes she looked like a blurred imitation of her former self. She did not take the drugs which had been prescribed for her and flushed them down the lavatory to conceal this omission from Lee. She kept none of her after-care appointments with the psychiatrist, but took good care to dress herself neatly on certain days of the week, as if she were going to the hospital, and Lee believed her.
Accustomed as he was to dealing with the sick, Lee fed her and cared for her, although, in herself, she seemed much the same as she had always been. Besides, he had few patterns of normal behaviour with which to compare and contrast her ways.
One day, she roused herself sufficiently to go downstairs and put his alarm clock in the dustbin. She said that the tick irritated her. After that, there was no more means of telling the time except for Lee’s wristwatch, so he was often late for work, although the days he passed at the school were scarcely different from the nights he passed at home. Both were barren. He felt as though all his vitality had drained out through the perforations of the needle. Each morning on the stairs, he passed the blonde girl, Joanne, and the swift, fascinated distaste in her glance instantly defined him as a debauched, shameless and abandoned person. Her look made Lee nervous and a little wistful. But she never missed crossing his path on the staircase and he was always aware of her precociously slumberous gaze fixed on his face when he gave her form their weekly lessons on current affairs and political institutions.
Seated at the round table in the bleak middle of a Sunday afternoon, he marked a pile of fifth-form essays on the British Constitution and found, written in a round, childish hand, only the following words on one sheet of paper: ‘They say this is a free country but I am not free in any way so stuff your free country.’ It was difficult to mark Joanne’s essay or to guess at the impulse which prompted it, though he thought she would not have submitted it to any other member of the staff. He scrawled ‘amplify’ at the bottom in red but she did not do so; it seemed the written word was not Joanne’s medium. She had a name for waywardness but Lee paid no attention to staffroom gossip though he noticed in class she was always biting her nails and her nails were brown with nicotine.
An unhappy adolescent will clutch at any straw. Joanne, who was dissatisfied, incorporated her schoolteacher in her own illusory web where, quite unknown to himself and entirely without his consent, he led a busy, active life of
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