Free Love by Angela Carter Page A

the hospital giving Annabel’s name and address to a nurse. He spelled the name ‘Annabel’ twice out loud and then found he could not stop repeating the letters unless he kept his hand in front of his mouth. Annabel was nowhere to be seen. A man whose face had been smashed by a bottle lay on a bench, swearing. A pale child inserted sixpence in a machine and withdrew a paper cup of coffee. Another nurse (though perhaps it was one of the first two or one of the onlookers or, indeed, another nurse altogether) offered Buzz a sedative. Lee continued to feel nothing but shock. Annabel on a stretcher, covered up with blankets, vanished through a pair of swing doors. Somebody was trying to inject Buzz with something. What was the child doing here; she could be no more than twelve years old, sitting on a bench, swinging her legs and giggling. Admitted to a night ward without flowers, Annabel would wake in the worst of fears and think herself still dead, if she woke at all, that is.
    Once out in the hospital yard, bundled outside by who knew how many nurses, orderlies and extras, Buzz attacked his brother again but Lee broke free and ran for it. The hospital was perhaps a mile and a half away from the quarter where they lived and Lee made his way up the hill by short cuts and back alleys, glancing behind him from time to time, but he soon shook Buzz off and at last found himself in front of Carolyn’s house as a church tower somewhere in the city below struck three. He rang Carolyn’s bell and she opened the door. Her tawny hair hung down the back of a crimson satin kimono but the yellow light of the street lamps took all her colours away. She saw such misery in his face she grew breathless for she had lain on her narrow bed all the time since he had left her, staring into the darkness, imagining him beside her.
    ‘I knew you’d come back,’ she said. ‘I just knew.’
    ‘Oh, my love, it’s not that,’ he said, ashamed. ‘Let me in for a while, I can’t go home.’
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘It’s very melodramatic,’ said Lee. ‘You would hardly believe it.’
    They went up the stairs to her room and the lights switched off automatically behind them. Once inside her door, she was startled to see him so grotesquely smeared with Buzz’s greasepaint and filthy from the chase through the streets. He dropped his jacket on the floor and lay down on her bed. She did not know what to do and moved about her room uneasily; she was not dressed properly for receiving bad news. Lee found and lit a cigarette, unpleasantly aware that everything he did or said could not fail to breathe stale cliché for he had seen so many scenes of this nature in ‘B’ feature films, it seemed, in reality, second hand. How was he, then, to invest the horrifying with dignity?
    ‘She . . .’
    ‘Pardon?’ she said.
    ‘She tried to end it all, love, she almost did it. My Annabel, that is, Annabel to whom I’m married, that is.’
    She lay down beside him and he stroked her hair. She had no vocabulary to deal with the event, either; besides, she had thought of herself only as the Other Woman, never as a Femme Fatale. ‘Good heavens,’ she thought. ‘I must be dangerous.’
    ‘Can I sleep here? I want to keep away from my brother, he’s in a homicidal mood.’
    ‘Yes. Of course.’ She found she was crying a little and thought Lee must also be crying when it was only the scalding of his hypocritical eyes. As soon as they were in bed together, he did something he could never afterwards explain away or justify to himself; he performed an act which was, in the strictest sense, gratuitous. Because she was female, naked and available, he fucked her while she continued to cry, aware of some gross impropriety but quite unable to resist it. He appeared to be behaving in a perfectly involuntary way, as if to prove to himself he was indeed a villain untouched by any normal human sentiments, and thus extracted from himself a false confession to