“Oh would some power the gift give us,
To see ourselves as others see us!”
Robert Burns.
“You’re mad, do you know that?” laughed Cathy as the speedometer needle touched 80. “You’re totally, utterly, irredeemably crazy!”
“What do you mean, crazy? I’m not crazy, I’m just practical!” Robin shouted back over the buffeting of the slipstream. “Life is too damn short to go slow!”
They were driving north on Bedford Road toward Katonah. It was a bright day in early October, unseasonably warm, so Robin had put down the roof of his silver Mustang so that the wind would ruffle their hair. As they sped along, overtaking every other car on the highway, they left behind them a whirling cyclone of crimson and yellow leaves.
Robin was always frightening Cathy, which was one of the reasons she loved him so much. He was tall and sculpted and handsome, with brushed-up black hair, a strong jawline and sapphire-blue eyes that always looked as if he was finding life amusing. If they were eating outside on a restaurant balcony, he would jump up when the check was put in front of him and throw himself over the railings, regardless of how far down he might fall. If they were swimming in the Housatonic, he would climb up to the bridge and dive headfirst into the water, even though the river was dangerously shallow. He would challenge anybody who annoyed him—parking attendants, shop assistants, cops, other drivers. Cathy had never met anybody so fearless. He always seemed to be daring the world to stand up to him.
“We can stop at Willy Nick’s before we go to your sister’s,” Robin shouted. “I’m jonesing for some of their crab cakes!”
“Okay, but careful!” Cathy shouted back as Robin had to swerve to avoid an oncoming bus.
“Careful? What does that mean?” he asked.
Those were the last words he spoke as they neared the intersection with Parkway where a huge maroon truck pulled out across the road in front of them. He stood on the brakes, but they were driving twenty miles an hour too fast. The Mustang was nose-heavy and slid sideways with its tires screaming in a shrill operatic chorus.
Cathy clung to the door handle, and all she could see was trees and road signs rotating around her and then the huge white letters MOVING MAN INC. The Mustang slammed broadside into the truck with a deafening crash, although Cathy didn’t hear anything at all. Her door was flung open and she was thrown out onto the road, almost as if somebody had taken hold of her arm and forcibly yanked her out of the passenger seat. She tumbled over and over, grazing her shoulder and knocking her head hard against the concrete.
She lay on her back for a moment, shocked and concussed, staring up at the sky. She could hear a high singing noise in her ears. Then she heard a stentorian roaring sound, and a wave of heat rolled over her. She managed to turn over onto her side and prop herself up on one elbow. It was then that she saw the Mustang was burning fiercely, orange flames leaping up the side of the truck.
The driver and his mate were climbing down from their cab, two black men wearing maroon overalls. They tried to approach the Mustang, but the heat was too intense. They had to raise their arms to shield their faces and back away,
At first, Cathy couldn’t see Robin, and she thought that he must have managed to escape. Surely he had managed to jump out, in the same way that he jumped off balconies and bridges, but she didn’t see him anywhere. At that moment, though, the wind fanned the flames to one side, and she saw him still sitting in the driving seat, a scorched black figure with his brushed-up hair alight, frantically wrestling to free himself from the wreckage. His eyes were still white but circled with red. He looked more like a Halloween demon than a man who was being burned alive.
“Robin!” she screamed, or thought she screamed. She climbed to her feet and made her way unsteadily towards the blazing car, but as soon as she came within twenty feet of it she found that the heat was unbearable, hotter than an open oven, and like the men she couldn’t venture any closer.
Meanwhile, the truck’s driver had run to his cab and was now hurrying back swinging a large yellow fire extinguisher. While his mate was calling 911 on his cell phone, he unfastened the nozzle and started to spray the burning Mustang with foam. He sprayed Robin first, turning him instantly from a black demon into a struggling parody of a snowman. Flecks of white foam were whirled upwards by the heat and blown into the trees by the wind, where they clung like blossoms.
A station wagon stopped not far away, and a stocky man in a tan suede jacket ran up, carrying a smaller fire extinguisher. He and the truck driver gradually managed to subdue the flames, and at last they guttered out, although the tires were still smoldering, and so much acrid grey smoke was billowing from the upholstery that the Mustang was intermittently lost from sight.
Cathy cupped her hand over her nose and mouth and made her way into the smoke, as close to the car as she could, even though it was still far too hot for her to try and open the driver’s door.
Through streaming eyes she saw Robin sitting behind the steering wheel with his head bent forward, still clutching his seat belt buckle. His hair looked like a yard-broom that had been burned right down to the last few spiky bristles, and the skin on his hands and forearms had blackened and split so that scarlet flesh showed through.
The truck driver came up through the smoke behind her and laid one hand on her shoulder. “Ain’t nothing you can do for him, lady. I’m sorry. We’ve called for the paramedics and the police. You’d best take care of yourself, make sure you ain’t got no bones broken, nor done yourself any other kind of mischief. I saw you come flying out of that car and it was almost like the angel of the Lord reached down and hauled you out of there his self.”
Cathy nodded, too shocked to be able to say anything. She found it almost impossible to believe that this grotesque figure sitting in the car was actually Robin—the same Robin who had made love to her this morning, just as it was growing light. The same Robin with whom she had been laughing and joking only minutes ago. They were supposed to be going to Willy Nick’s and then to visit her sister Jeanette. How could this have happened? How could this incinerated effigy be him?
“Come on, lady, come away,” said the truck driver. “Like I say, there ain’t nothing you can do to help him now. Nothing that nobody can do for him, no how.”
Cathy was about to turn away when Robin lifted his head. His face was a ghastly mask, with rags of burned skin hanging from it, but he opened his red-rimmed eyes and stared at her.
“Cathy?” he croaked between cracked and bleeding lips. “Cathy, save me.”
* * *
It was early on a Friday morning in the second week of January when Cathy’s iPhone warbled. She was standing in the kitchen filling the kettle to make tea. It was still dark outside, and a light but steady snow was falling.
“Cathy? This is Megan.”
Megan was Nurse Megan Wing from the Burn Center at Bridgeport Hospital, where Robin had been taken after the crash, and where he had been undergoing specialized treatment ever since. She sounded emotional, and Cathy’s heart sank.
“What is it?” she asked. She could see her face reflected in the kitchen window, and she thought she looked like a ghost standing in the snowy yard outside, staring in at her herself. “What’s happened?”
“It’s good news, Cathy. Robin has come out of his coma. He opened his eyes for the first time about an hour ago, and he’s actually managed to say a few words. He asked where he was and he also asked where you were.”
“Oh my God, really?” Her eyes were instantly crowded with tears. “Is he still conscious now?”
“He’s under heavy sedation, of course, but he’s been drifting in and out. I’m sure that when you come over today, he’ll be able to speak to you. “
“I’ll come right now. It’s snowing some, but it doesn’t look too bad.”
“Just take it easy on the turnpike. I saw on the news that there was a pile-up at the Route 1 intersection.”
“Oh, you can bet I will. I’ve had enough car wrecks for one lifetime. Thank you, Megan. I’ll see you later.”
* * *
Cathy hurriedly dressed in her pink roll-neck sweater and jeans, then shrugged on her dark-brown duffel coat. She was sitting on the stairs, pulling on her UGG boots, when her cousin Holly came out of her bedroom door, yawning.
“You’re not going out already? It’s only ten after six. And look out there—it’s snowing!”
“The nurse at the Burns Center just called. Robin’s woken up. He opened his eyes and he actually spoke.”
“He’s awake?” Holly asked. “That’s amazing.” She made no effort to sound enthusiastic. They had argued about this over and over again. Even if Robin survived, Holly had insisted he would never again be the handsome, athletic daredevil that Cathy had fallen in love with. He had suffered over 70 percent burns, especially to his head and arms and upper body, which should have been more than enough to kill him. It would take years of intensive therapy for him to be able to perform the most rudimentary functions, such as feeding himself and bathing, and apart from that, he would be hideously scarred. Even Nurse Wing had warned Cathy that underneath the pressure mask that was protecting his face, he no longer had a nose or lips, and his ears had been burned off. Even the most skillful of reconstructive surgeons would not be able to give him his good looks back.
But Cathy had said, “I don’t care how much he’s changed. He’s still Robin underneath. Can’t you understand that? His soul is still Robin. Nurse Wing said the first thing he asked was, ‘Where am I?’ and the second thing was, ‘Where is Cathy?’”
As she went to the front door and opened it, Holly followed her. “You know how much I care about you, Cathy. You really need to think about what you could be getting yourself into. You’re only twenty-two, for Christ’s sake. You’re clever, you’re pretty. You have so much to look forward to. Don’t saddle yourself with a cripple for the rest of your life.”
“Holly! How can you use a word like that? I love him!”
“You love the memory of him, sweetheart. The way he used to be. But he’ll never be like that again. And being all burned up like that, it will have changed his personality, too. There’s no way he’s ever going to be the same. How could he be? Would you be, if you hadn’t gotten out of that car and had burned up with him?”
Cathy sat in the driveway in her car, with the engine running, and the windshield defroster switched on to full blast to melt the thin layer of pearly frost that had formed overnight. She knew how much of a challenge it would be to take care of Robin. But he was still alive, and now he was awake, and he had asked about her. That was all she could possibly ask for.
* * *
Nurse Wing was waiting for her in the smart, open-plan reception area of the hospital. She was tall and Swedish-looking, with blonde hair scraped back into a short pony-tail and pale blue eyes. As soon as Cathy came through the doors, she walked across and took hold of both of her hands.
“Oh! You’re so cold! But I hope this news will warm you up a little. Doctor Fremont says that he cannot believe that Robin is making such a strong recovery. He is still very sick, of course, but we have taken him off the danger list.”
“Is he awake?”
Nurse Wing smiled and nodded and led her by the arm along the corridor. “I told him that you were coming and he said that he couldn’t wait to see you. When I told him how long he had been unconscious, and yet you had come every single day to sit by his bedside, he couldn’t believe it. I think if he still had any tear-ducts, he would have cried.”
They reached the end of the corridor and Nurse Wing opened the door labelled STAFF ONLY. Inside, there was a small changing room, and just as she had done every day when she visited Robin, Cathy took off her coat and put on a green surgical gown and cap, and a mask. She took off her boots, too, and replaced them with pale-green theatre clogs.
When they were ready, they crossed the corridor to a room labelled MR ROBIN STARLING. STERILE AREA. NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE.
The room was dimly lit, and the venetian blinds were drawn, although Cathy could still see snow clustering on the windowsill outside. Robin’s bed was in the center of the far wall, two drip stands and a monitor softly beeping beside him. Robin was propped up by two large pillows. His face was covered with a transparent TFO mask, which allowed his doctors to see how the healing of his face was progressing. Cathy had already been told that even after reconstructive surgery, he would have to wear the mask for twenty hours a day for at least the next two years.
Both of his arms and his chest were still wrapped in white, mummy-like dressings.
Cathy approached the side of his bed, and he turned his head towards her. All she could see underneath the plastic was a knotted mass of reddened welts, but his eyes were open and glistening, and she could see that through the holes in the mask he was staring at her.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered. His voice hadn’t changed.
She pulled up a blue plastic chair and sat down close to him. “How can you say that? I love you. I’ve been coming every single day.”
“Megan told me. I don’t know why you bothered. Look at me. And the same could have happened to you.”
“Robin, it’s going to take time. I know that. Years, even. But I’ve talked to your doctors, and they’ll be able to give you a whole new face.”
Robin’s eyes rolled uncontrollably. “They’ve told me that, too. But what kind of a face? I don’t have a nose anymore. My ears are gone. I’ve seen people whose faces have been burned as badly as mine. It doesn’t matter how good the surgeons are, they all look the same. Like monsters.”
Cathy laid her hand on his bandaged arm, and he grunted in bitter amusement. “You won’t even be able to hold my hand, do you know that? I’ve lost all of my fingers. Oh, I think my left thumb managed to survive. I won’t be much use to you in bed, either. Not unless you like your wieners extra well-done.”
Cathy shook her head, and she couldn’t stop her eyes from filling with tears. “I don’t care, Robin. I love you. I’m not going to walk away from you, ever.”
Robin started to cough, harsh and phlegmy, and Nurse Wing came forward with a plastic bottle of water so that he could sip some through a straw. “Thanks, Megan,” he said when he could speak again. He turned his gleaming, masked face back towards Cathy and added, “Megan…she’s been sent directly from heaven. She treats me like I look normal.”
“You do look normal, Robin, for a burn victim,” said Megan. “And from now on, you can only begin to look better.”
“Hunh,” said Robin, and then lapsed into silence.
Cathy didn’t really know what to say to him. Should she tell him about everything she had been doing since the accident? How she had moved from her parents’ house in New Milford to stay with Holly in Fairfield so that she could be closer to Bridgeport? Somehow it seemed rather petty and self-congratulatory to tell him about that. I’m such a martyr. You look hideous, but I haven’t abandoned you.
After a long silence, Robin lifted up both of his bandaged arms like a frustrated teddy bear and then let them drop back onto the bedcover. “Cathy, the first thing I thought about when I woke up was you. To tell you the truth, sweetheart, I haven’t been able to think about anything else.”
Cathy smiled and said, “I don’t care how long it takes, Robin. I’ll always be here for you.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” Robin said, and coughing again, but when Nurse Wing came forward with the water bottle, he waved her away. “You’re such a pretty girl, Cathy. I can’t expect you to devote the rest of your life to a man who looks like me. I’m going to be a freak, no matter how good they try to patch me up. What do you think people are going to say when you walk into a room with me? They’re going to pity you, that’s what. They’re going to whisper about you behind your back, and they’re going to feel sorry for you. You don’t deserve that.”
“Robin, my feelings for you, they haven’t changed at all. If anything, they’ve grown stronger.”
“Well I’m afraid that’s just too bad, Cathy, because I’m not going to let you waste yourself on me, not the way I am now. God made you beautiful, and you need a handsome prince in your life, not a burned-up mess like me.”
“Robin—“ Cathy began, but he started coughing again, and his coughing was so hard and so harsh that it sounded as if he were ripping his esophagus into shreds.
Nurse Wing touched Cathy’s shoulder. “I’m afraid I think you should leave him for now, Cathy. He’s very distressed,” she said.
Robin went on coughing and coughing, gasping for breath at the end of each spasm, and so Cathy pushed back her chair and stood up.
“Please,” Nurse Wing said, and so she left the room, feeling both guilty and abandoned.
Does Robin really not want me anymore, or is he just saying that to spare my feelings? How can he possibly understand how I feel? I don’t understand it myself. I should walk out of this hospital now and drive home to New Milford and forget I ever knew this man. But for some reason I can’t. He touched the very core of me, not just because he was so good-looking, but because he was always prepared to challenge everything that was ordinary and boring and conventional. He set me free, and I can’t just turn my back on him, no matter what he looks like now.
She sat down in the reception area and, after a few minutes, Nurse Wing came out to join her.
“Robin’s reaction is only to be expected,” she said, taking hold of Cathy’s hands. “Most of our patients with severe facial disfigurement feel the same way. We call it disturbed body image. They have a preoccupation with the change in their appearance and the loss of their normal looks. They also develop a strong fear of other people’s reactions and of being socially rejected.”
“Is there anything I can do to help him cope with it?” Cathy asked.
Nurse Wing shrugged. “You can continue to tell him that you still love him. But that’s only if he allows you to go on visiting him. He just told me that he doesn’t want to see you again. I’m sorry, I really am, but he feels so strongly that you’re a beautiful young woman, and that you should find somebody else.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow anyway. Maybe he will have changed his mind,” Cathy said.
“Why don’t you give it three or four days? Even a week. Doctor Fremont and Doctor Mazdani will be talking to him tomorrow about facial reconstruction, which may give him more hope of returning to a normal life. Besides, if you leave him for a while, he may start to realize that he misses you.”
* * *
When she turned into the driveway of Holly’s house, Cathy saw that Holly’s car was missing, leaving crisscross tire tracks in the snow. When she went inside, she found that Holly had left her a note on the kitchen table.
Cathy,
Mom not well. Gone to Darien for the weekend. Probably back Tues or Weds.
XX
She went to the kitchen window and looked out. Although the backyard was still blanketed in snow, and the sky was still slate-grey, the snow had stopped falling and the wind had dropped. The world was silent and very cold, as colorless and motionless as a black-and-white photograph.
So what do I do now? Do I forget Robin? Or is there a way to make him think differently about me? His one reason for telling me that our relationship is over is my looks. I know I’m pretty, but supposing I wasn’t? Then he wouldn’t have any reason to end our relationship. Suppose I was just as monstrous as him.
She opened the cutlery drawer. Inside was a clutter of corkscrews, slotted spoons, potato peelers and spatulas. There were also several kitchen knives, including a very sharp knife with a six-inch blade which Holly used for cutting up chickens and trimming steaks.
If I can still recognize Robin underneath his disfigurement, then he’ll be able to recognize me, no matter what I look like. That morning before the accident, he said he loved me. He told me that he had never felt the same way about any other girl.
She took out the six-inch knife and cautiously ran her fingertip along the edge. It cut into her skin, although not deeply enough to draw blood. It was so sharp that she didn’t even feel it.
She took the knife into the bathroom and stood in front of the sink, staring at herself in the mirror. There would be blood. There would probably be a lot of blood, so she pulled one of the bath towels off the heated rail and folded it over the rim of the bath, well within reach. Then she took off her pink sweater and removed her bra so that she was bare-breasted.
Her face in the mirror was pretty, but it was totally expressionless. There was no appeal in her eyes for her to change her mind, to forget Robin and find somebody else. She took hold of her left ear and pulled it outwards, and then she positioned the edge of the knife in between the top of her ear and the side of her head.
The knife hadn’t hurt her when she had cut her finger and it didn’t hurt her now. She drew it downwards and forwards at a slight angle, and in one stroke she sliced her ear off completely. Blood immediately flooded down the side of her neck, and she dropped the ear into the sink so that she could reach for the bath towel and press it against the side of her head. She felt hardly any pain at all, more of a chill, although the blood was warm as it ran over her collarbone and dripped off her breast.
Surprisingly, the flow of blood stopped quickly. Cautiously, she lifted away the sodden bath towel and turned her head to one side so that she could examine what she had done. Her ear was nothing more now than a bloody hole, but it still looked neater than the shrivelled-up bacon rind of Robin’s ears. She looked down at her severed ear lying in the sink. It could have been some kind of mollusk, and she found it hard to believe that a few moments ago it had actually been part of her.
She placed the sticky-handled knife in her other hand and grabbed her right ear. She was quicker and more decisive this time because she knew that it wasn’t going to hurt very much, and she sliced it off without any hesitation. Again, she let it drop into the sink, and again she pressed the blood-soaked towel to the side of her head. She looked at herself defiantly in the mirror, with runnels of blood all down her chest, and she thought, yes, I can do this, I can change myself so much that Robin will love me for what I am.
Her hands were trembling, and she realized that her system was beginning to show signs of shock, but she was determined to continue. Now she leaned forward closer to the mirror, and lifted up the tip of her nose between finger and thumb. Look at you, little piglet, she thought. Then she placed the knife underneath her nostrils like a shining steel mustache.
She cut upward into the septum, but this was much harder and much more painful than cutting off her ears. She couldn’t stop herself from letting out a strangled moan as she was forced to cut upward again and again, until at last she reached the bone. Blood poured over her upper lip into her mouth and dripped off her chin.
Gagging and shaking, she sliced the knife across the bridge of her nose so that she could twist the nub of flesh away from her face. She staggered backwards, dropping the knife with a clatter onto the tiled floor, and when she reached out to stop herself from falling over, her hand left a crescent-shaped smear of blood across the wall.
Cathy stood in the middle of the bathroom, giddy with shock. It took her almost a minute before she was able to approach the sink again and look into the mirror. Where her nose had been there was now a gory cavern, and she could see right into the dark recesses of her sinuses. As she breathed, she made a thick bubbling sound, and she could feel the blood pouring down the back of her throat, which made her retch.
She had begun her self-mutilation, but she knew that what she had done was not enough. Robin was disfigured much worse than she was—well beyond any chance of ever having his original good looks restored. He was suffering third-degree burns over most of the upper half of his body, and as he had told her, he wouldn’t be of much use to her in bed, so his genitals must have been shrivelled up, too.
Cathy bent down, blood still spraying out of her sinuses with every breath, and she picked up the knife. She felt numb and detached, as if she were having an out-of-body experience, or watching some other young woman in a horror movie. Her hair was sticking up in a tangled fright wig, and her chest was varnished red with gradually-drying blood.
She took hold of her left nipple and stretched it outwards in the same way that she had stretched her ear. She hesitated for a moment while she swallowed a mixture of blood and vomit, and then she sliced upwards and cut her nipple clean off. She dropped it into the sink along with her ears and the lumpy remains of her nose.
Next, she cut off her right nipple, and she stood there with both breasts bleeding, as if she were ready to wet-nurse an infant vampire.
She let the knife fall into the bath and then she shuffled back into the kitchen, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind her. Robin had suffered burns to turn him into a monster, so she had to suffer burns too. She went to the cupboard where Holly kept her blender and her weighing scales, along with the chef’s blowtorch that she used for melting the sugar on top of crème brûlée.
Cathy took the blowtorch down from the shelf and slowly made her way out of the kitchen and along the corridor to her bedroom. She sat down on the bed, and as she did so, she could see that it was snowing again. She was finding it very difficult to breathe now, and she kept making a terrible snorting sound.
It seemed to take her hours to wrench down her jeans and push them off her feet. Her head was throbbing and her breasts hurt so much that she couldn’t stop the tears from running down her cheeks. Robin would have to love her after she had suffered so much. When he saw what she had done to keep him, he would have no choice.
She dragged down her thong, left it dangling around one ankle. Then she picked up the blowtorch, thumbed off the safety-catch, and pressed the button to light it. She sat there for a long time, staring at the pointed blue flame while the snow continued to fall outside. She wondered if she secretly wanted the blowtorch’s butane gas to run out so that she wouldn’t have to do what she intended to do next.
This will ruin me forever, she thought. But then I’m ruined already. I’m a monster and there’s no going back.
She leaned forward and played the flame of the blowtorch up the inside of her left calf. The skin reddened and blistered instantly, and she gave a honking scream of agony through her noseless face. But somehow, the sheer intensity of the pain made her even more determined to do it again, and now she directed the flame at her knee and then her inner thigh. As she burned away the outer layers of skin, and then her nerve endings, she felt as if she understood completely what Robin must have experienced when he was burning in the driver’s seat of his Mustang—unbearable pain, but then a strange absence of any sensation at all. She continued to direct the flame at her inner thigh and felt nothing.
Cathy lay back on her pillows where her Raggedy Ann doll was lying with its ginger hair and its fixed, silly smile. She opened her legs wide and turned the blowtorch onto her vulva, so that it looked for a moment as if she were being penetrated by a penis made of blue fire. She smelled burning hair and burning flesh and her lips curled up like living worms thrown onto a hotplate.
There was no name for a pain like this, but Cathy lay back and continued to hold the blowtorch between her legs until her brain shut itself down. The blowtorch dropped to the floor. The snow fell. Cathy twitched and shuddered, her eyes half-open, only the whites showing. She dreamed that she was dead, and in a way she was because her brain refused to allow her to wake up.
* * *
It was the second day of June when Nurse Wing came into Robin’s room at the Bridgeport Hospital. He had undergone his third operation to remove the keloids on his face and to rebuild his nose, but he was still wearing his transparent facial orthosis. The sun was shining and white cumulus clouds were hurrying northeastward, as if they were panicking.
“Robin, I have a visitor for you,” said Nurse Wing.
Robin was sitting in a chair by the window, wearing a thick maroon robe. His bandaged wrists peeked out of his sleeves. The time to fit him with prosthetic hands would come later, when his burns had completely healed.
“Really? I’m not expecting anybody, am I?” Robin had caught something in the tone of Nurse Wing’s voice. Usually, when his sister or one of his friends came to visit him, she sounded cheerful and upbeat. Not now, though. She sounded almost as if she were trying to give him a warning.
Before Nurse Wing could say any more, the door behind her opened wider and a young woman walked in. He didn’t recognise her at first because her face was completely covered by a flesh-colored mask, made out of the same material as pressure bandages. She could have been a giant doll. She was wearing a flowery summer frock in red and blue and yellow, but her legs were also covered by flesh-colored pressure bandages, and she was pushing a walker.
Nurse Wing attempted a smile and said, “I’ll leave you two together then. Call me, Robin, if you need me.”
She left the room and closed the door behind her. The doll-like young woman stood unmoving for a few seconds, and then she pushed her walker up to Robin. Before she could say anything, he realized who she was. It was the perfume she was wearing, the same perfume that he had given Cathy the week before the accident.
“Cathy? You are Cathy, aren’t you?”
The doll-like woman nodded.
“Holy Christ, Cathy, what’s happened to you? Did you get involved in another wreck?”
Cathy sat down in the chair next to him. “No,” she said in a strangely hollow voice, as if she were speaking through a megaphone. “Nothing like that.”
“Then what? What’s happened to your face?”
“I did it myself, Robin. I did it for you. Well, that’s not really true. I did it for us.”
“I don’t understand, Cathy, You did what for us?”
“You said you didn’t want to see me again because you were going to turn out to be a monster, and I was pretty.”
“I know,” Robin said. “I know I did. But I only wanted to be fair to you. You shouldn't have to spend the rest of your life with a gargoyle like me when you could snap your fingers and have any man who takes your fancy.”
“That’s why I did it. I love you, Robin. You and me, we’re soul mates. Now we’re more than that. Now we look like each other, too.”
With that, she reached behind her pressure-mask and unfastened it. She bent her head forward, carefully eased it away from her face and then looked up at Robin, her brown eyes bright, her lips smiling.
Robin couldn’t speak. He simply stared at her in revulsion. Her brown eyes may have been bright, and her lips might have been smiling, but there was nothing but two triangular caverns where her nose had been, and she had no ears. She looked like a ghastly parody of Lon Chaney playing The Phantom of the Opera.
“That’s not all,” she said, and she eased herself up so that she could lift her dress and show him the purple braided scars between her legs. “No other man is going to want me now, Robin, so you don’t have to worry about me. We can be together forever.”
Robin said, “Cathy, pull your dress back down. And, please, put your mask back on.”
“Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you pleased I did this? I still have a whole lot of surgery to go through. But they’re treating me here at Bridgeport, too. I come here two or three times a week, so we can see each other all the time.”
“What in God’s name have you done to yourself?”
“I did it for you, Robin. I thought you’d be pleased. You are pleased, aren’t you?”
“Cathy, just because I look like this doesn’t mean that I want a partner who looks like this. I might be a freak myself, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be attracted to another freak.”
Cathy’s eyes filled with tears. “What are you saying? You’re not saying that I shouldn’t have done this? Robin, I did it for you!”
Robin closed his eyes for a moment. While he did so, Cathy replaced her pressure-mask and fastened it. When he opened his eyes he said, “I’m going to have to be truthful with you, Cathy. What you’ve done to yourself, I think you must be psychotic. You look inhuman, and that’s the kindest thing I can say. Don’t blame me for it.”
He reached across and pressed the bell beside his bed. After a few moments, Nurse Wing came in.
“I think visiting time’s over,” Robin said. “I don’t know what to say to you, Cathy. I’m totally shocked.”
Nurse Wing walked over and helped Cathy to stand up. Cathy’s shoulders were quaking with grief, although she wasn’t audibly sobbing.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to you now, Cathy,” Robin said. “All I can do is wish you the best of luck, and say that I’m very, very sorry for you.”
“So there’s no chance at all?” Cathy asked in a choked voice.
Robin shook his head and lifted one of his bandaged stumps towards Nurse Wing. “Me and Megan, we’ve become really close. She’s been taking care of burn patients all of her life, and they don’t put her off. And I have to say that she’s beautiful, like you used to be.”
* * *
Holly was waiting for Cathy in the reception area. She didn’t say a word as they walked out into the windy afternoon and across the parking lot to Holly’s car. She could guess what had happened, and she didn’t want to say, “I told you so.”
They were speeding back to Fairfield on the turnpike when Cathy said, “Well. It seems like I have only two choices now. I could join a circus. Step right up! Come and see the noseless, earless, unfuckable woman.”
“Oh, Cathy. What’s the other choice?”
Cathy sat quite still for a while with her hands in her lap. Then she unbuckled her seat belt, opened the car door and threw herself sideways out of the car and onto the road. She bounced, and bounced again, her arms and legs flying, and then she was hit by a huge Mack truck and disappeared from sight.
Later, when the police and the ambulance had arrived, Holly went over to the truck driver, who was sitting on the steel divider in the middle of the road, still badly shaken.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Holly told him.
The truck driver shook his head. “Never seen nothing like it. Your car door come flying open, and do you know? It was like the angel of the Lord plucked her out of there, in person.”
Graham Masterton is a British horror author. Originally an editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, his first novel, The Manitou, was released in 1976 and was adapted into a film of the same name. Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Mirror. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Masterton was also the editor of Scare Care, a horror anthology published for the benefit of abused children in Europe and the USA. Buried, the latest book in his Katie Maguire crime series, was released in December 2015.
Masterton’s novels often contain visceral sex and horror. In addition to his novels, he has written a number of sex instruction books, including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed and Wild Sex for New Lover.
Masterton currently lives in Surrey, England.