Affinity

by Sarah Waters

‘You like to look at them,’ Miss Haxby said then. She said she had never had a visitor yet that didn’t like to stand at that window and watch the women walk. It was as curative, she thought, as gazing at fish in a tank.

When I asked her to tell me her history she did so dully, as if she has told it so many times before—to the matrons, to Visitors, perhaps only to herself—that the telling has made a kind of story of it, realer than memory but meaning nothing. I wished I could tell her that I know what such a story feels like.

All the world may look at me, it is part of my punishment.’

‘Please, miss,’ cried one of them, ‘don’t cut my hair! Oh please, miss!’ Miss Ridley picked up the scissors and gave a couple of snaps with them, then looked at me. ‘You would think I was after their eyes, wouldn’t you, Miss Prior?’