Three narrow storeys, three uneven hallways each three paces long: nothing more than a mousehole, a gingerbread house from which she would never escape again, inside which she could not breathe for much longer. Even so, she would go on watching, patient as an ailing she-wolf. She only had to glance out the window to see how she might slip and fall. The gleaming surfaces, the mirror-smooth roads, the featureless faces could all pull her far away from herself, so far she would have no way of returning. There were so many ways to get lost. The day was slick over Portobello Road. She''s sitting in this armchair so faded she no longer remembers what colour it once was, even though she clearly remembers the day she bought it, as light-hearted, as energetic as if she had been spreading her wings for the first time. Maybe this armchair had only ever had those colours bestowed on it by her gaze that day? With lowered eyes she now considers her hands.

Or rather, the paths traced on her hands, this way and that, fierce furrows that left no space untouched: the surface of an unknown planet, her hands. And the strangeness of their posture at rest. Her palm forms a hollow, like a bowl, her fingers curl inward, but not gracefully: sharply, contorted by thick bones, with a far darker colour than the rest of her wholly pale skin. These hands had become talons, but talons incapable of grabbing or crushing any prey. Not that she would have wanted to crush anything. Caress, yes; stroke, yes; trace curves, yes: gentleness, after all, was what she had once represented in her distant youth. Gentleness had shaped Mary; sweet sweet Mary Rose as her parents had called her, and her sisters had mimicked them mockingly as if they wanted to blot out their timid, delicate sister. Who, as a small child, had been like a porcelain doll, then, as she grew up, more like a stork, slender, slightly hunched over, eternally indecisive, smiling that smile that conveyed to everyone around her the terror flitting just beneath her surface.

Her smile, her soft lower lip, her eyes so pale that they nearly disappeared, the precocious groove between her brows, had ensnared her as she grew up. She had been reduced to a Mary scattering talcum and lavender, her hands always at work on bows for presents, bouquets of flowers, small decorative trinkets, lacework and knitting and crochet, all that, yes, a very good girl, upright and sensible, but not a girl to ride or screw or fuck, as we might so crudely put it these days, but why not, those words say exactly what they mean, why bother with coy euphemisms, really, what''s the point? She was fifteen during the war. Fifteen was the age when girls had to take whatever they could get, kissing all those dashing boys stretching their tight army uniforms, luring them with their bodies, their hair, their embraces, their desires, why pretend when time is so short, why act as if this whole little game wouldn''t end this way, with sex in all its forms, indoors, in cars, in the countryside, in fields of wheat, among trees, clouds, storms, as bombs fell, sex ripping apart cheap clothes and ruining set hair and straining sweet skin? How good it must have felt to claim some right to them, to have some hold on those handsome, sturdy, rugged men from the countryside, to relish that energy all too quickly gone as their trains bore them away to their inescapable fates! And parents pretended not to see anything because that was what being patriotic meant at that time, putting your tongue in a boy''s mouth, putting your hand on his crotch to tell him to come back, telling him to fight but also to take care of himself, telling him not to lose hope at the worst, at fear breaking out and flesh splitting apart and bone jutting out of wounds and faces half gone, promise me you''ll come back, all right I will, and the memory of a kiss, and the red trace of a kiss, and the swelling of a kiss would not disappear, not even when their eyes were opened to the pointlessness of war at the exact moment so many other eyes were closed for having seen it up close. But not Mary. At fifteen she was a good girl, so timid that the word itself seemed to have been inspired by her, a wallflower, the soft, pale, fragrant flower that sank into the wallpaper during parties while other mouths greedily lunged forward to claim what had been promised them. Wallflower - what a nice, insipid, even stupid word, there weren''t any flowers on the walls, they were only on her dress, flowers aplenty, that horrible muslin dress chosen by her father for her fifteenth birthday, with such delight in his eyes as he offered it to her that she could not possibly dream of saying ''I don''t want it'', the joy in his eyes was that of giving a gift, and the dress, even if it was ugly, gathered in all the wrong spots to emphasise her lack of breasts, not a tight skirt that would hug her hips, no, a hideous floating, flowery, gathered dress was what she had to wear, and it doomed her to becoming the wallpaper flower that nobody invited to dance despite her sandy blue eyes, despite her charming lips, despite her smile which promised the brightest of gifts: she sighs and sips the punch that goes to her head and she watches the other girls dancing and she sighs again. But, by some miracle, that evening, the last one before the big day, that wasn''t how it ended, was it, Mary Grimes? Oh, you''re looking away, you''re hiding those hands that are nothing like the ones you had at fifteen, those weren''t talons, no, not those hands with soft palms, pink nails, hands ready to be grabbed, tapping a rhythm you liked so much on your knees, why would you look away from the memory of your greatest glory?.