If symptoms

persist.. .

HUMAN folly is without beginning or end, thank God, else what should we who are stricken with graphomania have to write about? Perfection, like Switzer- land, is all very well in its way, but it is rather boring as a subject for prose. Luckily for me, there is no shortage of folly in my small corner of the universe. Whenever I think I have finally plumbed its depths, a patient obligingly steps forth to renew my faith in man's infinite fa- culty.

Last week, a young woman was admit- ted to my ward complaining of severe abdominal pain for which, after exten- sive investigation, there was no adequate explanation.

There was nothing for it but to talk to her, a step which we doctors were natu- rally most reluctant to take.

She was only 19, but she had two chil- dren, both by the same father, Wayne. He, of course, was the psychopath in the ointment. He beat her regularly, although — as she was quick to point out in his defence — not so badly that she had ever required hospital treatment afterwards. The longest he had gone without hitting her was two months.

She was bright and articulate, the efforts of our educational system notwithstanding, and well-mannered also, though her earliest memories were of her brutal stepfather attacking her drunken mother with a knife. She never drank herself, but she recognised at once the similarity between herself and her mother, and her stepfather and her boyfriend.

`He can be very nice sometimes,' she added with a dying fall.

`When he's not hitting you,' I said. `Yes,' she replied. 'It sounds silly, doesn't it?'

She loved him even as she feared and hated him. His temper was ungovern- able, and sometimes he would drag her by the hair from the nearby shop, if he thought she had been away from home too long. (In my area this is considered normal behaviour.) His violence was now so persistent that she had had enough; she wanted to leave him but dared not do so for fear of his vengeance.

`He's tried to strangle me twice. My daughter screamed while he was doing it.'

'And what did you say afterwards?' I enquired.

`I asked him not to strangle me in front of the children.'

I explained the implications of what she had said and added that there were very few pure victims in the world.

She told me then of the secret diary she kept, with a record of all Wayne's assaults on her. It was written in a secret code of her own devising, which would be easy enough to crack. She kept it under the floorboards so that Wayne should not find it.

`Why do you write it?' I asked.

`So that when Wayne murders me the police will be able to tell that it was him.'

Later that very day I received a call from a solicitor about another of my patients.

`I thought you ought to be aware, doc- tor,' said the solicitor, 'that your patient Mrs B— has just made a will in which she leaves everything to her husband providing he doesn't murder her, but everything to her nephews and nieces if, as she says is more than likely, he does.'

Theodore Dalrymple