Vander. Vander. Vander. She had not been surprised at all when in the restaurant he had reached out and taken her hand. All after that had happened with the smooth, relentless inevitability of the progress in a dream. And as in a dream there was the conviction that all this had been foreordained, the room, the bed, the sliver of burning afternoon light between the curtains, the man toiling over her with a dream-torturer's intentness; it all seemed merely a set of variations on events that had already taken place, in another, more keenly wakeful, compartment of her life. Since earliest childhood, for as long as she could remember, she had been prey to hallucinations; at least, that is what people insisted they must be. To her, they were like real happenings, or memories of real happenings made immediate and vivid. This was the reason for all her confusions, all her lapses from what they called reality. It was simply that the things she saw in her head were so clear and clearly present, so matter-of-fact, that she could not distinguish them sufficiently from things that were verifiable, by the measurements the others said must apply, and verification was what they were always demanding of her, with more or less sympathy, more or less exasperation.That was why the voices spoke to her, to insist on their different version of events. None seemed to realise, the ones who spoke within her or without, what a deafening din they made, sounding all together. Against such a cacophony how could her pleas be heard? She longed to be able to prove, even if only once, incontrovertibly, not what they wanted her to know, but what she knew. In a film that she had seen when she was a child there had been a man who in what seemed a nightmare had fought and killed someone and then had woken to find himself clutching a real button that in the dream he had torn from his victim's coat. Someday she too might come back from one of her so-called hallucinations and open her palm and show them in triumph one tiny, hard, bright bit of evidence that even they could not deny.

The first time that she knew her mind was unfixably wrong was on a winter Sunday afternoon when she was six, or seven. She had been ill for as long as she could remember, but because she was so young she had not yet realised that she would not get better, only worse. That Sunday her father and her mother had taken her in the car for a drive by the sea. She had said she would not go and her father had laughed and said he knew she only wanted to stay by herself in the house so she could drink whisky and smoke cigarettes. His teasing was a kind of violence. He was in one of his smiling rages because it was Sunday and there would be no theatre performance that night and he would have to stay at home and be bored. They travelled up the coast road, taking the scenic route, as her father sourly said. He did not like to drive and so her mother drove. Along the way they stopped at places but did not get out of the car. In the front her parents sat gazing bleakly out across the sea to the islands lying humped in a grey, salt mist, while in the back she knelt on the seat and looked through the rear window at the cars going past on the road. In many of the cars there were children like her, morose, pale faces floating in the windows, glowering at her. In the silence at her back she could feel the deepening desperation of the adults. Her mother smoked without cease, lighting each new cigarette from the stub of the old one. Open the window, for God's sake, her father said. When they came to the end of the coast road her mother turned the car around and her father muttered something and the argument began. They argued in an undertone so that she should not hear; the vehemence with which they fought was all the more awful for being muffled. The short day was ending, and the undersides of the low clouds in the windscreen were tinged a shade of furnace pink. See, her father said to her in a false voice, his stage voice, breaking off for a moment from the argument and pointing, it is the colour of a coke fire! And he laughed his laugh. She turned her eyes from the louring sky and looked out to the left at the sea that came up to the grassy edge of the road. Long, undulant waves were washing slowly in, wave upon thick wave, unbreaking wrinkles, mud-coloured. She felt her flesh shrink, as a snail would shrink from being touched. A vast weight, the weight of the world itself, was pressing against her, so that she could not breathe. It was as if something frightful had happened and this was its aftermath, this scorched sky, these turbid, relentless waves, the savage murmuring in the front seat. And she was alone; that, above all. The hawser had fallen away, the prow had turned toward the open sea, and she knew that now she would never come back. Her father, sensing her distress, perhaps, touched a fingertip to her mother's shoulder to silence her and turned around in his seat and smiled frowningly and said her name, as if he were not sure that it was still she who was sitting there, his little girl so changed in an instant. That was the first time she had smelled the almond smell. Then the car was stopped at the side of the road with one wheel mounted on the verge and the doors open, and she was slumped sideways on the seat with her head leaning out and the air cool on her brow and warm stuff bubbling between her lips, and her father was kneeling before her peering anxiously into her face, asking her something. Behind him the night, a bank of brownish darkness, was coming in across the sea, and high up there were the tiny lights of an aeroplane, now ruby, now emerald. Suddenly an enormous seagull flashed past, very close, falling diagonally through the brumous air on stiff, extended wings, and for a second she thought its icy eye had fixed on her, in warning.

Her father. She saw him often when he was not there, a ghost of the living man. For instance while Vander was busy goughing and grunting at her that second time, mouth fixed wetly like a sea creature to her shoulder, Daddy had opened the door of the room and walked in, speaking. He was barefoot, and was wearing an old pair of faded blue baggy trousers of the kind that he always wore when he was on holiday. He was young, far younger than she could ever have known him, and sun-tanned, and smiling in that fierce way, showing his fine, sharp teeth, that he always did when he could not find sufficient reason to be angry. His chest was bare, and he had a white hand-towel draped around his neck. He had been shaving, there still remained a moustache and goatee of lather that gave him the look, in negative, as it were, of a dashing Elizabethan villain of the kind he so often played. He was talking to someone in a farther room, her mother, she supposed, telling her something, a joke, or a story that he had just remembered, sketching abstract diagrams on the air with the razor as he spoke, in that way that he had, always animated, always dominating, cutting and carving and moulding the world. The razor was tiny, she noticed; he must have forgotten his own and borrowed this one from her mother. Perhaps it was the razor he was talking about, perhaps it had reminded him of something that had happened on one of his tours abroad; it amused him to tell her mother of his adventures, teasing her, trying to make her jealous with talk of eager actresses and stage-door propositions. The light behind him was a glare of azure and gold, and there was a slash of purple shadow there, and a parrot-green something, a palm leaf, perhaps, that kept moving to and fro in an odd, jerking, agitated way. What caught all her attention, though, was the bead of blood, the size of a ladybird, on his lip, where he must have cut himself with the razor, without noticing. She had always been fascinated by her father's mouth; she liked to watch it moving while he spoke, liked to be kissed by it, those dry, warm lips, the upper one, where the blood was now, shaped exactly like the stylised seabirds she used to draw in her picture book as a child. She liked to feel the prickle of tiny bristles on his chin, liked to smell his laughing breath. He had stopped speaking now, and waited, listening, with a slack smile, his head lifted at an angle and his eyes bright, those lips a little parted, the bleb of blood seeping pinkly into the soap moustache. When no response came to the story or the joke he had been telling, because her mother, if it was her mother, had stopped listening, or had fallen asleep, the light went out slowly in his face, and the smile turned to a vacant frown, and, feeling the smart at last, he dabbed a finger to his lip, and looked at the blood and seemed puzzled, as if he did not know what it was, or how it had come to be there, on his finger, on his lip.