Tom was bouncing Jerry back and forth on a table tennis bat to which he had him attached by a piece of elastic. Smack. Smack. Smack. The Major settled into a chair and grinned. Jerry freed himself and dashed across the room picking up an umbrella which he pitched into Tom’s open mouth. The umbrella opened inside Tom’s head making his face huge, spread like a parachute. Then Tom, sitting on a drop-leaf table, was propelled from the kitchen by a giant catapult. The table became transformed into an aeroplane, the leaves opening up for wings, and he flew round the pink living room, glaring down with narrowed eyes and pointed teeth on the fearful, running Jerry whom he bombed with a marrow released from the underside of the table. The mouse swallowed the thing whole. Gloop. He was bloated into the shape of the marrow. Tom flew out of the window and circled the house, re-entering by smashing another window. The Major chuckled heavily saying, ‘Go on, Tom!’ Jerry goaded the cat into crashing into a kitchen dresser. Tom emerged from the pile of broken crockery waving a white flag, stars spinning around his head. The Major smiled in quiet satisfaction.

SEVEN

All right, so what was my problem, then? Why should I get myself into such a state, making such a fuss just because people were trying to help me? What made me the way I was in the first place? Illness? Paralysis? Trauma? Maybe the last, yes, maybe, but my intransigence was not the result of an accident, not that. It was not in my mind at that time to ask myself such questions, though in the end I would be forced to look at my past, the whole dim province that lay beneath the dust and grime on the ramps and galleries of my memory.

Mostly I had begun to think about the motives of those about me who seemed so earnest in their efforts to galvanize me, metamorphose me into something fulsome, a whole appropriation of the kind of creature they believed I should be, an approximation perhaps, of them, or the people they thought themselves to be. They, like all before, made their decisions certain in the belief that they were acting in my best interests. And it came easily to them, for I did not, could not, speak up in my own defence.

I had, it seemed, come to take my stillness and the comfort I found there, too much for granted. Yes, that was it – I had become complacent, too happy with my lot, and now I was being made to account for it. I had no inalienable right to contentment, I knew that, but these people were taking great exception to me and it looked as if they were not going to rest until they had come up with some permanent arrest of my catatonic state.