*****

1. Eventually words appeared from her crumpled face and her eyes emerged again, desperate, ...’Ah wuz gang oop simmer-tree ... t’see ‘im’, she whispered. I was struggling at first, it had come out of context but I got my ear in quick enough to stay with her. ‘...boot, it were too wet, and ah’m jus’ too frit, a feared a falling agin...it’s all too mooch t’bear ...’ she disappeared again into a pained whisper and her face folded and crumpled and disappeared again. I watched the tissue being wetted and wrung and wetted and wrung and wrought into shreds that finally lost all form and function and fell quietly to the ground between us like white flecked ashes from the simmer-tree.

2. I sat there wondering what she looked like behind those coal black glasses that I’ve never seen come off as she told the story of ‘the evil one’ and many horrors that seemed like a clash of every terrifying film that I usually jump up off the settee to switch off

3. This time, unlike last time (which was the first time), I decided to be a bit bolder and more direct.
‘How do you feel?’
She froze like a rabbit in headlights and looked at me, a fleeting look of terror passed across her eyes before she bolted. Off we went down the tunnel. I was carried along on the whoosh of energy that hurtled down that rabbit hole faster than you could say ‘I’m late’. We twisted and turned, fast and furious, this way and that, and around and about in a dizzying descent, spiralling along a myriad of chaotic connections that left me bewildered and befuddled, desperately wondering how we got from here to there and there to there and back to here before we suddenly disappeared down a trapdoor free falling seemingly for ages before, ‘bang’, we hit the ground and she said, ‘I was put in an asylum when I was 15’.