ABSTRACT

The young woman says nothing. She sits and looks at me and smiles a wide, vacant smile but her eyes are dead. Her wrists and the ends of her fingers are wrapped in plasters, grubby and fraying where she has chewed the fabric, unable to tear at her own skin. While still fixing me with her chillingly blank smile she raises her knuckle to her mouth and starts gnawing at it. She is in her early twenties but is dressed like a middle-aged woman. The smile is fixed and then suddenly shatters and she starts to cry, with uncontrollable sobs.