This question absorbed her completely and she did not rest in her mind until she found an answer which satisfied her. ‘How do you see me?’ she asked Buzz. He picked at his lower lip with his fingernail for a while and then replied: ‘In fits and starts.’ ‘That’s not good enough,’ she said ominously and relapsed into speculation. ‘Mrs Collins still refuses to see you,’ another sister told Lee, whose home was now unbearable for the tap dripped Annabel’s tears and the very sofa seemed re-upholstered with her anguish. At last Buzz led him by the hand to an interview with Annabel’s psychiatrist for by now Lee was unable to negotiate the city on his own and could not see where he was going. To compound his distress, he had been drinking heavily during the past fortnight and afterwards he could remember nothing between leaving his house and arriving as if miraculously translated into the warm interior of a cosy hospital with hardly a movement at all on his own part. Buzz abandoned his brother in a room full of faded chintz and old magazines where he waited forty minutes, staring vacantly at an empty wall; intermittently he saw the face of his mother as it had looked after she had been dipped in the petrifying well of madness.
