Ariah had apparently been driven to live her life as if it were fiction. She would pass over the denouement – when evil was rooted out in an adventure story, or when the main character found happiness. ‘The end of a tale is a compromise,’ she said once. ‘The middle is a fatty piece of meat, full of gristle, not always easy to chew.’

It seemed that tales first became a driving force in Ariah’s life when she was a teenager. Her father had brought an old animated movie about Snow White and her seven dwarf admirers, childmen. It wasn’t the sweet princess who had enthralled her but the Evil Queen who loved only herself. Consumed by jealousy over her stepdaughter, the Evil Queen entered a secret chamber and concocted a deadly potion. Another herb helped her change into a wrinkled old granny. Then she persuaded innocent Snow White to accept the poisoned apple.

Young Ariah had become immersed in this tale in a way that was difficult for me to fathom. In her eyes, the Queen was no mere cruel and jealous woman but a scientist who worked in a spectacular laboratory. Ariah had decided that her own intellect was as sharp as that of the Evil Queen and so had travelled abroad to study. She majored in chemistry and then worked in a research institute at a university until she married.

I pieced together her story based on information that emerged at random, so the tale was incomplete, unsatisfactory. It didn’t explain the enigma of her hideousness. Waiting while she bathed one night, I hunted around for further clues. Her room contained a mirror and a dresser. There were no rows of cosmetics. Of course she didn’t need beauty products, nothing could redeem her looks. Even the mirror’s presence was odd. Why would someone with such a grotesque face want to gaze at herself?

I pulled out a dresser drawer and discovered a stack of documents and a framed picture. I was stunned to see a photo of a beautiful woman around thirty years old with straight black hair. Hair like Ariah’s. Could it have been her? If she was so beautiful once, then what had destroyed her face? I began to speculate. Maybe skin cancer had slowly ravaged her until the doctor’s verdict had come: she had only a few years to live. She was determined to spend the rest of her life living out her adolescent obsession with freakish tales. She had nothing to lose, not even her place in the world, because she would soon be dead.

When I heard her opening the bathroom door, I quickly shut the drawer. I caught a passing scent of soap, but her rotten smell never disappeared altogether. I returned to the wardrobe, ready to repeat my ritual.

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