His next actions might seem heroic, he imagined, if someone looked at just the actions without seeing inside his mind. In immense pain he rolled the wheelchair over to the door. He slid down in the chair so that his hands could touch the floor. This caused him so much pain that he fainted for a few minutes. When he woke up he remembered what he was trying to do. He looked at the floor and saw the hairpins which he had noticed earlier. They had fallen out of Annie's hair when she had rushed at him. Slowly, painfully, he managed to pick them up. There were three of them. Sitting up again in the chair brought fresh waves of pain.

While writing Past Cuts he had taught himself to open locks with things like hairpins. It had helped him write about a car- thief. It was surprisingly easy. Now he was going to open the door and go out into the house.

What made him overcome all his pain and do this? Was it because he was a hero? No, it was because he needed some Novril tablets and was afraid that Annie would not return for hours or would not give them to him when she did return. And he felt he needed an extra supply, to help him during those periods when she was too angry with him to give them to him.

It was an old, heavy lock. One pin sprang out of his hands, skated across the wooden floor and disappeared under the bed. The second one broke - but as it broke, the door opened.

'Thank you, God,' he whispered.

A bad moment followed - no, not a bad moment, an awful moment - when it seemed as if the wheelchair would not fit through the door. She must have brought it into the room folded up, he realized. In the end he had to hold on to the frame of the door and pull himself through it. The wheels rubbed against the frame and for one terrible moment he thought the chair was going to stick there. But then he was suddenly through the door.

After that he fainted again.

When he woke up, the light in the corridor was different. Quite some time had passed. How long did he have before she returned? Fifty hours, like the last time, or five minutes?

He could see the bathroom through an open door down the corridor. Surely she would keep the medicine there. He rolled down the corridor and stopped at the bathroom door. At least this door was a little wider. He turned himself round so that he could go into the bathroom backwards, ready for a quick escape if necessary.