He’s such a fuck-up.

Charles is a kind of Frankenstein. Well, no. What Avigail actually means is that he’s a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He reminds Avigail of the Native American character in the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What was that guy’s name? Chief …?

Chief …?

Gets smothered by a pillow in the end.

Very sad. Although it’s actually a blessing. Because he has no quality of life. Um. Or was it Jack Nicholson’s character – McMurphy – who is smothered by Chief?

Yes.

Avigail briefly imagines smothering Charles with a pillow.

Hmm. It would actually be a blessing. Because he doesn’t really have any quality of life.

Surrounded by all this stuff.

There’s a flatness to Charles. An otherworldliness. A deathly pallor.

Charles has a sewing room which is full of multi-coloured samples of mohair and buttons and kapok for stuffing. He doesn’t like talking about the bears because he isn’t particularly interested in the bears so he doesn’t bother. There is no profound emotional/spiritual connection to the bears – at least, none that he is aware of. But he is emotionally illiterate so he can’t be 100 per cent sure. Although he is 75 per cent sure.

Charles just got into making the bears as a sideline to gratify a woman he enjoyed a brief relationship with who ran a toy shop in the picturesque but puffed-up Cinque Port town of Rye. He had once worked, briefly, while still a student (he studied architecture – dropped out in his final year), as an industrial machinist.

He acquired skills.

Then the whole ‘bear thing’ just took off. Almost by accident. Almost ‘in spite of’.

Charles really is surprisingly good at making bears.

Although of late he has taken to making the bears but feeling unable to part with them once they are completed. Even if they have been commissioned.

Yes. Even bears with a sad and touching personal history connecting them, inviolably, to the person who has commissioned them. Heirloom bears. Post-bereavement bears. Totemic bears who represent something – or someone – tragically lost. Bears – for example – wearing a dress or a suit fashioned out of a former loved-one’s favourite garment or with a tiny pocket containing the ashes (in a special, sparkly-red vial placed in the approximate location of the heart area) of a lost parent or child or pet or lover.

Avigail notices that Charles has rather beautiful, delicate hands. Long fingers. Neat nails. And he never smells bad. He is clean. Which is some, slight, compensation, she supposes.

She knows that OCD and hoarding are related conditions so his rigorous personal hygiene makes a weird kind of sense to her.

Yes, that much, at least, she understands.

People really do bore Avigail half to death. She much prefers buildings. Buildings are just like people but they stay in one place and are generally open and hospitable. And they talk, but only very, very quietly. In hushed tones.

Avigail was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community. She didn’t prosper there. Her spirit rebelled against it. She wouldn’t conform. Her ‘out’ was anorexia. Long spells in hospital, months in special units, distant referrals, gradually – stealthily – establishing contacts and relationships in the REAL WORLD outside the Hasidic community. Just subtly, just tentatively. Over time.