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Heart Asks Pleasure First, the one classical piece she knew I could bear to listen to.
    But she couldn't quite do it. She missed notes and occasionally pressed two keys at once, and the more she went on, the more it faltered. As her fingers let her down, she frowned, then added her voice as well: gently singing along, eyes closed, supplementing the melody. But again, slightly off.
    I listened to the fractured music. Even confined in this place, she was guileless and uninhibited, but I saw the frustration on her face as she noticed her mistakes. A piece of beautiful music, reduced to stops and starts.
    Eddie did this, I reminded myself. It's not your fault.
    But as she stopped playing, her expression full of bemused disappointment, I felt a knot in my throat tighten with anger until I could hardly breathe. Until - rightly or wrongly - I knew exactly what I was going to do.

Chapter Four
    Sunday 7th August
    When she had finished on the computer, she opened the internet browser's history menu and began erasing the pages one by one. Even though her flatmate was away, the deletions were a necessary part of the ritual. First you externalised. Then you cleared up.
    She removed the search engine items for extreme porn sites and chat rooms, and then the details of the sites themselves. Her anonymous email address. Chat transcripts from the sex forums where she'd allowed people to tell her the things they wanted to do to her. She deleted all the web pages she'd so diligently searched for and explored. All the things that had, in their own way, personified the self-disgust and hatred she felt for everything about herself.
    When it was done, she walked back across the room to where she'd left her clothes, and knew that it wasn't even close to being enough.
     
    Half an hour later, Mary was sitting on the settee with her legs tucked underneath her, watching the television. Whatever release she'd felt from the internet had retightened now, and she felt even worse than before. It was like lancing a boil. If you didn't get all the shit out in one go, all you did was make the infection worse.
    The room was slowly darkening along with the day outside, and the light from the television flickered across her. Mary stared through the screen as images flashed up in front; news rendered meaningless in the silence. The only movement she allowed herself was to rub a single fingertip along one eyebrow, smoothing it down. One direction, over and over. Whenever she made a larger motion it shocked her body, as though someone had just shaken her suddenly and violently from a deep sleep.
    No good.
    It was astonishing really - how you could understand the emotions behind your actions and moods, and still remain in thrall to them. Mary knew from experience that in a few days' time, she'd look back on this and barely recognise herself. She'd see a stranger. A small, inadequate girl, curled on the settee, reduced to folding her arms and clenching her sleeves, and her skin along with them. Eventually, her mood would clear and the grip would lessen. But even though she knew this very clearly right now, it was no help whatsoever. Her depressions were like sinking into the blackest of dreams. No memory of the real world could help you.
    A nightmare had prompted this latest attack.
    As always, it had been drawn from her childhood, only for her mind to sketch over the top and elongate the details. Faces were stretched oval, so that teeth became fangs; fingers were popped double-length and formed into talons; an ordinary suburban kitchen was transformed into the scullery of a castle. Mary stood terrified as an enormous, dark-green vampire pressed the face of a peasant onto the top of a glowing red anvil. The man's fingers clawed desperately, but she couldn't even hear his screams over the angry barking of the monster holding him down.
    Who sent you here? Who sent you?
    Steam billowed up around a single, bright white eye, wide with panic, and Mary's mind flashed up