Then one day many years later her husband lost his eyesight in a chemical explosion at the laboratory where he worked, and Maddie found that she had to nurse a person she detested. Her life slowly trickled away down the sink of drudgery, as the frustrated man berated and reviled the woman who could never restore him. Their conflicts steadily intensified, and when one day he lashed out in anger, she instinctively slapped him in return. She was racked by guilt, but relieved by the act, and as the blood dripped from her swollen nose, a new idea began to form. She would fight back against this tyrant in her life. She would relegate the pointless misgivings, morals and civilities……….She would leave the way clear for revenge. Her personality tilted, and over the next three years she consistently tortured the man who used to share her bed - adding shards of glass and a variety of foreign bodies to his food, leaving doors closed so that he would walk into them and placing red hot cups with the handles facing away. She put chairs in the middle of rooms, changed the furniture around constantly, disconnected the ‘phone, and opened his letters. She remained silent for weeks, or she made herself hoarse by shouting into his face. Eventually the unloved son returned from abroad, discovered some of the tricks and abuses, informed the authorities who eventually intervened, and freed the prisoner. Maddie was admitted to a psychiatric ward, as her fragile mind defensively collapsed, and she was propelled into a melodrama of hysteria and self-neglect. She crawled along the corridors, lay on the floors for long periods, moaned and groaned, talked of suicide and wrote articulate malicious letters to her family. The marriage was dissolved, her son corresponded dutifully but occasionally, her ex-husband took up ballroom dancing, and she settled into an open-ended institutional life. She looked a bit like the old lady in the Bates’ motel.
Her cassette-radio-CD player was plugged into the mains correctly, but one of the switches had been moved to the ‘cassette’ position instead of ‘radio’. As there was no
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