A Taste for Malice by Michael J. Malone

against the mottled pink of her face. Drips from her hair threatened to refill her cup.
    ‘Look, why don’t I go and get you a towel,’ Jim said and stood up. ‘You’ll get an attack of the sniffles.’
    She pushed a rope of hair thick with moisture away from her face. ‘Okay. Thanks.’
    Moments later he was back with a towel. Then he noticed staining on the carpet around her feet. ‘You really need to get some dry clothes.’
    ‘JIM. Will you sit down and stop fussing? I feel enough of an idiot without you barging around.’ Her nostrils flared, her eyes bulged. Then as quickly as the storm blew in, it blew out. She sagged back into her chair.
    ‘Fuck,’ she said. This single syllable was drawn out, thick with desperation.
    ‘Sorry, honey. I was just trying to help.’
    She closed her eyes. It read to him as if she was fighting a further irritation. Then the flow of tears started up again. ‘Jim, it was awful. Do you know what I mean? Terrifying. I didn’t know where I was. Barely knew who I was. Couldn’t remember the name of the shop. I’ve been walking up and down this street,’ her right arm flew out to the side, she swivelled her head to one side and then to the other, ‘or was it that way? It was horrible.’
    ‘Honey, you’re here now. Safe.’
    ‘And I kept thinking, what if Ben was with me? I can’t be trusted to look after myself, what would have happened to him?’

    Apologising to the staff, Jim bundled a still weeping Angela into his car, drove her the fifteen minute journey home, poured a bath and helped her out of her clothes. By this stage, she wasn’t giving a thought to the fact she was naked, he didn’t think she was capable of thought, she simply obeyed his every request as if she was on automatic.
    In the bath, knees gathered to her chest she was like an island of bone jutting out from a sea of foam. Her slight limbs trembling within a translucent layer of skin. He hadn’t noticed just how thin she had become. As he soaped her down she gazed into neverland and allowed Jim to move her arms up so he could wash the flesh underneath.
    Dropping the sponge through the layer of bubbles to fill up with warm water and then slowly squeezing the contents down the knobbled line of her spine soothed him as much as it did her. It felt like a concrete thing to do, a way to connect with the tired and lost soul somewhere behind those vacant, staring eyes.
    Like a child she let him dry her while she sat feet planted on the rug, her backside on the edge of the bath. Carefully Jim drew the towel across her shoulders, down her back and arms and then across her breasts. Kneeling before her he attended to her feet, her legs and the soft brush of hair at their junction. All the while, Angela stared impassively into the distance.
    Then he dressed her in a robe, bound her hair in a towel and led her through to her bedroom. Once she was under the quilt he closed the curtains then walked out of the room. Closing the door behind him, he heard the sigh of the door as its base brushed across the thick pile of the carpet.
    In the kitchen, a mug of coffee heating his cupped palms he wondered at the new Jim Hilton and his calm acceptance of what needed to be done. Where did he come from?
    Short-term memory loss. That was what the doctors warned him to look out for. Four little words that came nowhere close to describing the chaos they could cause. They did nothing to prepare him for the panic in her eyes, the anger, the exhaustion.
    Earlier on that day he had, for the umpteenth time convinced himself that he needed to tell Angela the truth of their relationship. What would the truth do to her right now? She was too fragile. She needed her husband’s support. She simply couldn’t function without it.
    What was he going to do? Tell the truth, or continue with the lie? He thought of Angela in the bookshop; fear and uncertainty tattooed into every word that came out of her mouth.
    Who was he kidding? There was