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their wrapping and very badly thumbed.
     
    Things have moved quickly since Maud’s transgression. Limo-Li has been called to the school. As bad as possession of the wank panel was, it’s Maud’s own drawings that have caused the biggest problem. All sorts of agendas have come into play. Maud has inadvertently justified the school’s position on graphic novels by proving just how corrupting they are. The school board invested in a stack of memos (in colour), circulated and posted home, warning that possession of pornographic material is now an expulsion offence. TheP & F lobbied the council to try and force bookshops selling offensive material (bit vague that; no definition of ‘offensive’ was ever circulated) to keep it out of the reach of children (after all, look how well that worked with cigarettes!). The school counsellor has booked Maud in for two sessions a week to try and ascertain the depths of corruption they are dealing with and, undoubtedly, whether medication would help. (I’m just guessing about the medication bit but it would be a nice touch, wouldn’t it?) The English Department was asked to review its teaching novels and has removed several from the curriculum including Beloved and Ulysses. It’s been riotous. Every adult in the school has gone into some sort of bowdlerising hysteria.
     
    I watch tonight after Limo-Lionel comes back from his summons to the school. I watch him take every pencil and piece of paper he can find out of Maud’s room. He doesn’t speak to her. He doesn’t hit her. Who knows what depths of humiliation he has been made to endure at the hands of the school administration. I can only hope that they were great depths. Fathoms. Great yawning abysses of testicle-sweating humiliation. The gathering of Maud’s artistic accoutrements takes about five minutes. He is as measured and composed as I have ever seen him. I actually think he looks intensely sad. But it could be me who is sad. I’m not sure.
     
    After he leaves her room, Maud goes to the shelf and gets down that big shiny copy of Alice in Wonderland. She sits at her little table and opens it. At first I think she is reading it but then I see her hand sashay across the page in front of her. I can’t quite make out what she is using to draw with. It looks like a tiny black turd. Please let it be a piece of charcoal. She moves fast, her fingers fluttering and dawdling like a dancer’s legs, lashing here, smudging there, fluid and sinuous. Precision given way to grace.
     
    She draws a naked woman, prone, legs slightly apart. One hand rests on the belly, the other lower. The figure is all movement, for all its stillness, with wells of shadow polishing the curves of her face and hips. The face and hips are full. It is such a simple drawing, but it is kind and beautiful. It is drawn on the titlepage of that very expensive looking Alice in Wonderland, so the feet, slight but detailed, stretch over the publisher’s mark at the bottom of the page. I’m not sure but I think it’s Chatto & Windus.
     
    I suppose you’re wondering how I know all this. I know because Maud tears that very expensive titlepage out of the book and sticks it in her window, facing out. I move right out of cover with the binoculars, right up to the window, so I can look at her drawing, look at her.
     
    And she can see me looking.
     

NINE

    Win-dow-to-the-Soul

    He watches me through binoculars. He sees me closer than I have ever seen myself. Sometimes I sit as close to the mirror as I can get and look at the fine down on my face and the darkened pores of my brows (little craters hiding ingrown hairs) and know that he can see all of me. But he still looks. It is a terrible, exciting thing, this closeness. I pull to get closer to it, little by little. Each small pain a redemption. And when I start to feel numb, I pull from somewhere else. My eyes get smaller and smaller until I am sitting so close to the mirror that my breath washes back at me and