Empty.

Just a massive vacuum within inhabited by a swarm of anxiously buzzing bees.

What’s next?

What’s next?

Indecorous?

Immodest?

Fuck Avigail! Screw her!

The emotional flashback is seductive. But it isn’t real. It is just a learned response. Grannon compares it to a looping tape that is suddenly triggered and then starts playing in the mind (trots out a familiar, painful tune) but has no useful purpose. It’s exaggerated. It’s ultimately destructive. It simply generates anxiety and pain. It’s anti-social. It’s inappropriate. It’s infantilising. Worst of all, it’s self-sabotaging.

His cruel Inner Critic compels Charles to remain at the approximate developmental age of a fourteen-year-old boy.

Charles is the Peter Pan of the emotions.

(Hello?

Hello?

Where Tinkerbell?)

When Avigail recommends that Charles covers his drying rack with a sheet, Charles’s mind flashes back (without him knowing it, because the flashback is emotional, not intellectual) to the time (the many times) that his father, Barri, humiliated him by announcing to his extended family, during the evening meal, that he shouldn’t be allowed orange cordial with his food (he never asked for cordial! He never asked for it – even though he was thirsty! Even though he was bone dry!) because he was still pissing the bed. Charles wet the bed in his father’s house on weekend visits because he was too frightened to get up and go to the toilet at night after he’d flushed on one occasion and had been slapped for waking his grandfather (whose bedroom was adjacent to the toilet). And then, when he didn’t flush, he had been attacked and ridiculed for being dirty and bad-mannered and ill-bred.

‘This may be acceptable in Bulgaria,’ his father’s first/only wife hissed, pointing angrily into the golden bowl (Charles held firmly by the collar of his pyjama top, his three half-brothers sniggering in the background), ‘but it isn’t acceptable here.’

TRI BRAWD!

TRI BRAWD!

TRI BRAWD!

That’s what Charles feels when Avigail calls him immodest. All the anxiety. All the ridicule. All the humiliation of his father’s earlier attacks.

Six minutes remaining.

Avigail is saying something.

Charles tries to –

SHAME!

tune in –

HUMILIATION!

over the blare of his –

FURY!

emotional flashback.

There is the sound of something falling in another room.

EH?

‘Is the cat okay, do you think?’ Avigail is wondering. ‘She took quite a tumble before …’

She?

SHE?!

What is it with this infernal woman and she? Charles asks himself.

Meanwhile, he is surreptitiously tapping the thumb of his left hand (the left is his dominant hand) with a finger of his right.

I AM KING OF MY OWN SERENITY

I AM THE RULER OF MYSELF …

he intones, visualising a crown,

I AM SOVEREIGN,

he intones.

Tap, tap, tap on the thumb.

I AM SOVEREIGN.

Next, the index finger –

Tap tap tap …

WITH THIS, MY INDEX FINGER, I AM POINTING AT THE INNER CRITIC – THE NEGATIVE, ‘PARENT’ VOICE – I AM POINTING AT HIM AND IDENTIFYING HIM.

GET LOST!