I know that’s what she’s planning.

I suppose I should just be grateful that the over-tight jumper didn’t prove to be my undoing (Ch. 7? Ch. 8?). Although I’m not sure how that would’ve been managed, technically (I’m always interested in the technical side of things. This isn’t much of a virtue in your average romantic hero, I realize. ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Miss Eyre, but the axle on your carriage has noticeable signs of wear …’). To be perfectly frank, it doesn’t have all that much credibility as an idea (dispatched by an over-tight jumper?!). I mean this is only my second chapter! It’s early days yet. To kill me with a lethal piece of knitwear after – how many? – three pages? That’d be so … so clumsy, so amateur. The critics’d have a field day! Although she killed someone in another novel (forget the name of it, offhand) with a frozen, miniature butter pat and then she won a bloody prize. A prize! A big money prize!

What were they thinking?!

In fact there was this very sweet man in her last novel – kind and gentle, a bit of a wimp; rather like me, I suppose (sound the alarm bells!!) – who she hit with a sudden brain haemorrhage just when everything had finally started to work out for him. I don’t remember his name or all the circumstances exactly. But she’s probably planning something similar for me now. Right now.

What a nightmare. What an awful, bloody nightmare.

‘… store your bulbs.’

Franklin D. is speaking but I miss the gist of it worrying about all this other crap. There was one character who fed his fingers to an owl and then walked in front of a bus. Or a lorry. But he was the hero. And I don’t know if he died or not. I think she left it open so that if the book was successful she could write a follow-up. But the thing bombed.

Ha!

Although – damn! – none of this works, logically – logistically (Oh great, Mr Technical!). Because I’m thinking these thoughts in October 1984 and she only started writing seriously in 1987 on a student trip to Ireland while volunteering for the Council for the Status of Women. She wrote a wretched piece of teen fiction during that interlude called ‘The Perverse Yellow Flower’. It was inspired by three paintings of Christ she saw in a shop window in Windsor and a conversation she had while she was looking at them with a man called Marcus who wanted to make her join a weird cult called Sabud.

What?!

Hang on a second …

Where the heck did all that come from? How could I …? I … I just can’t be having these thoughts right now, about her other books and her sadistic urges and her … I dunno. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s … it’s unnatural, it’s supernatural.

‘… store your bulbs.’

Argh. Am I just sabotaging myself again? Same as I always do? Am I? Eh? Mr Bickerton, will you sign on the dotted line for your regular delivery of a truck-load of self-pity, please? Oh you’ve lost your pen. And your pencil. Boo-hoo-hoo.