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The Collector

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M. What do you think I’ve been these last two months?

C. I bet a lot of people think about you. Miss you. I might be dead for all anyone I knew ever cared.

M. Your aunt.

C. Her.

(There was a silence.)

C. (he suddenly burst out with it) You don’t know what you are. You’re everything. I got nothing if you go.

(And there was a great silence.)

December 7

He’s bought the chair. He brought it down. It’s nice. I wouldn’t have it down here. I don’t want anything from down here. A complete change.

Tomorrow I’m going upstairs for good. I asked him afterwards, last night. And he agreed. I haven’t got to wait the whole week.

He’s gone into Lewes to buy more things for the room. We’re going to have a celebration supper.

He’s been much nicer, these last two days.

I’m not going to lose my head and try and rush out at the first chance. He’ll watch me, I know. I can’t imagine what he’ll do. The window will be boarded and he’ll lock the door. But there’ll be ways of seeing daylight. Sooner or later there’ll be a chance (if he doesn’t let me go of his own accord) to run for it.

But I know it will be only one chance. If he caught me escaping he’d put me straight back down here.

So it must be a really good chance. A sure one.

I tell myself I must prepare for the worst.

But something about him makes me feel that this time he will do what he has said.

I’ve caught his cold. It doesn’t matter.

Oh my God my God I could kill myself.

He’s going to kill me with despair.

I’m still down here. He never meant it.

He wants to take photographs. That’s his secret. He wants to take my clothes off and… oh God I never knew till now what loathing was.

He said unspeakable things to me. I was a street-woman, I asked for what he suggested.

I went mad with rage. I threw a bottle of ink at him.

He said that if I didn’t do it he’d stop me having baths or going out in the cellar. I’ll be here all the time.

The hate between us. It came seething out.

I’ve caught his wretched cold. I can’t think straight.

I couldn’t kill myself, I’m too angry with him.

He’s always abused me. From the very beginning. That story about the dog. He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it.

He hates me, he wants to defile me and break me and destroy me. He wants me to hate myself so much that I destroy myself.

The final meanness. He’s not bringing me any supper. I’m to fast, on top of everything else. Perhaps he’s going to leave me to starve. He’s capable of it.

I’ve got over the shock. He won’t beat me. I won’t give in. I won’t be broken by him.

I’ve got a temperature, I feel sick.

Everything’s against me, but I won’t give in.

I’ve been lying on the bed with G.P.’s picture beside me. Holding the frame in one hand. Like a crucifix.

I will survive. I will escape. I will not give in.

I will not give in.

I hate God. I hate whatever made this world, I hate whatever made the human race, made men like Caliban possible and situations like this possible.

If there is a God he’s a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

He cannot be good.

This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn’t necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.

All in vain. All wasted.

The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.

More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.

It’s as if the lights have fused. I’m here in the black truth.

God is impotent. He can’t love us. He hates us because he can’t love us.

All the meanness and the selfishness and the lies.

People won’t admit it, they’re too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can’t see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there’s always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.

The black and the black and the black.

I’ve not only never felt like this before, I never imagined it possible. More than hatred, more than despair. You can’t hate what you cannot touch, I can’t even feel what most people think of as despair. It’s beyond despair. It’s as if I can’t feel any more. I see, but I can’t feel.

Oh God if there is a God.

I hate beyond hate.

He came down just now. I was asleep on top of the bed. Fever.

The air so stuffy. It must be flu.

I felt so rotten I said nothing. No energy to say my hate.

The bed’s damp. My chest hurts.

I didn’t say a word to him. It’s gone beyond words. I wish I was a Goya. Could draw the absolute hate I have in me for him.

I’m so frightened. I don’t know what will happen if I’m really ill. I can’t understand why my chest hurts. As if I’ve had bronchitis for days.

But he’d have to get a doctor. He might kill me, but he couldn’t just let me die.

Oh, God, this is horrible.

(Evening.) He brought a thermometer. It was a 100 at lunch, and now it’s a 101. I feel terrible.

I’ve been in bed all day.

He’s not human.

Oh God I’m so lonely so utterly alone.

I can’t write.

(Morning.) A really bad bronchial cold. Shivering.

I haven’t slept properly. Horrid dreams. Weird, very vivid dreams. G.P. was in one. It made me cry. I feel so frightened.

I can’t eat. There’s a pain in my lung when I breathe, and I keep on thinking of pneumonia. But it can’t be.

I won’t die. I won’t die. Not for Caliban.

Dream. Extraordinary.

Walking in the Ash Grove at L. I look up through the trees. I see an aeroplane in the blue sky. I know it will crash. Later I see where it has crashed. I am frightened to go on. A girl walks towards me. Minny? I can’t see. She is in peculiar Greek clothes — drapery. White. In sunshine through the still trees. Seems to know me but I do not know her (not Minny). Never close. I want to be close. With her. I wake up.

If I die, no one will ever know.

It puts me in a fever. I can’t write.

(Night.) No pity. No God.

I shouted at him and he went mad. I was too weak to stop him. Bound and gagged me and took his beastly photographs.

I don’t mind the pain. The humiliation.

I did what he wanted. To get it over.

I don’t mind for myself any more.

But oh God the beastliness of it all.

I’m crying I’m crying I can’t write.

I will not give in.

I can’t sleep. I’m going mad. Have to have the light on. Wild dreams. I think people are here. D. Minny.

It’s pneumonia.

He must get a doctor.

It is murder.

I can’t write it down. Words are useless.

(He’s come.) He won’t listen. I’ve begged him. I’ve said it’s murder. So weak. Temperature 102. I’ve been sick.

Nothing about last night, him or me.

Did it happen? Fever. I get delirious.

If only I knew what I have done.

Useless useless.

I won’t die I won’t die.

Dear dear G.P., this

Oh God oh God do not let me die.

God do not let me die.

Do not let me die.

3

WHAT I am trying to say is that it all came unexpected.

It started off badly because when I went down at half past seven I saw her lying by the screen, she’d knocked it over in falling, and I knelt by her and her hands were like ice, but she was breathing, it was a kind of rasping sigh, very quick, and when I lifted her back to bed she came to, she must have fainted in the night when she’d gone behind the screen. She was cold all over, she began to shiver terribly, and then to sweat more and she was delirious, she kept on saying, get the doctor, get the doctor, please get the doctor (sometimes it was general practitioner — G.P., G.P. she kept on, over and over again, like a rhyme), it wasn’t her ordinary voice but what they call sing-song, and she didn’t seem to be able to fix her eyes on me. She was silent a while, and then it was “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” only the words were all slurred like she was drunk and she stopped in the middle. Twice she called Minny Minny like she thought she was in the next room (it was her sister), and then she started to mumble a lot of names and words, all mixed up with bits of sentence. Then it was she wanted to get up and I had to stop her. She really struggled. I kept on talking to her and she would stop a minute, but so soon as I went away to look after the tea or something she was off again. Well, I held her up to try to help her to drink the tea but it made her cough, she turned her head away, she didn’t want it. I forgot to say she had nasty yellow pimples one corner of her lips. And she didn’t smell fresh and clean like before.

In the end I got her to take a double dose of the pills, it said on the packet not to exceed the stated dose, but I heard once you ought to take twice what they said, they were scared to make it too strong for legal reasons.