Love by Angela Carter

Carolyn came out through a pair of swingdoors. Her reddish brown hair was caked and spiked with dried blood and a muzzle of bandages obscured her pretty face completely. She would not look Lee in the eye and hardly spoke to him as she brusquely brushed past him towards the open air. It was now about eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. Lee had nowhere to go but back to the flat and nothing to do there but clean the bathroom of blood before the rest of the residents in the house, who all shared the bathroom, discovered it had become an abattoir overnight. His clothes were spattered with Carolyn’s blood, also, and soon he saw himself as a red-handed butcher to whom both women seemed no more than curious meat. He had no equipment to deal with abnormal states of mind and his composure utterly deserted him. He entered a delirious state of wilful self-abandonment.
     

WHEN ANNABEL FOUND she remained alive, she did not know, at first, how to reconcile herself to it until she hit upon the device of believing herself invisible as long as she wore the skull ring, though she constantly wondered why, if this were so, so many people seemed to be able to see her. This question absorbed her completely and she did not rest in her mind until she found an answer which satisfied her.
    ‘How do you see me?’ she asked Buzz. He picked at his lower lip with his fingernail for a while and then replied: ‘In fits and starts.’
    ‘That’s not good enough,’ she said ominously and relapsed into speculation.
    ‘Mrs Collins still refuses to see you,’ another sister told Lee, whose home was now unbearable for the tap dripped Annabel’s tears and the very sofa seemed re-upholstered with her anguish. At last Buzz led him by the hand to an interview with Annabel’s psychiatrist for by now Lee was unable to negotiate the city on his own and could not see where he was going. To compound his distress, he had been drinking heavily during the past fortnight and afterwards he could remember nothing between leaving his house and arriving as if miraculously translated into the warm interior of a cosy hospital with hardly a movement at all on his own part. Buzz abandoned his brother in a room full of faded chintz and old magazines where he waited forty minutes, staring vacantly at an empty wall; intermittently he saw the face of his mother as it had looked after she had been dipped in the petrifying well of madness. Then a nurse came and showed him up a linoleum staircase which shone as if it had been gilded and Lee felt sure it reached almost as high up to heaven as Jacob’sladder although he turned off, as instructed, at the first landing and entered the whitest of offices. Here, he found a young woman seated behind an impressive desk. She was dressed entirely in black and lavishly hung about with hair of metallic yellow. Her eyes were concealed behind tinted glasses and her voice was as if smoked also, dark-toned and husky.
    ‘Mr Collins?’
    ‘Well, yes and no,’ replied Lee who always spoke the truth. A look of curiosity passed across her face. She gestured him to sit down.
    ‘A regulation chair of tubular steel,’ observed Lee and slithered from it to the ground. Where he lay, he saw how the walls of the room converged upon him from all four corners and crawled for refuge under the desk itself, where he found himself confronted by the woman’s high, brown boots in such an unnatural perspective that the feet were enormous and the uppers soared above him like mill chimneys. The boots were so beautifully polished they appeared irradiated from within.
    ‘A kind of expressionist effect,’ he said.
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘Everything is subtly out of alignment. Shadows fall awry and light no longer issues from expected sources.’
    ‘Do you go to the cinema often?’
    ‘Now and then. It stops us all from having to talk to one another though she never follows the story, she only looks at the pictures.’
    Since she wore no stockings, the grain of