He was the king, and that made me someone. I suddenly knew that I had lungs because they were empty and collapsing.” Fifty pages in, the flashbacks are still occurring, she’s still smitten. “My legs went rubbery on me and I giggled. Paula was smitten with Charlo when she first saw him. I asked my mammy when I was over there last week did we ever have flowery curtains and she said No, they’d never changed them, always stripes.’ I see flowers on the curtains - there were never flowers on the curtains in our room. ‘When I think of ‘happy’ and ‘home’ together I see the curtain blowing and the sun on the wall and being snug and ready for the day, before I start thinking about it like an adult. And the story is Paula’s recollections of her life, and what a hash she’s made of it. Paula Spencer, a woman in her thirties in the working class suburb of Dublin, is a battered wife, and an ‘alco’ mother of four, who only drinks after her kids are tucked into bed. The Woman Who Walked into Doors, said to be Roddy Doyle’s most grim work, to me, is not unlike P’s story. So, that I should pick up a book about a woman in an abusive marriage the week I heard of P’s bloody nose-bite felt like synchronicity at work again. She now wants to talk to the media about domestic violence in order to help women routinely thrashed from remaining silent.
After 10 years of stitches and blood clots, P walked out of her marriage with her eight-year-old daughter and filed a criminal case. He bit her nose off!”, a friend of mine told me a few weeks ago, describing the plight of a woman she knows - a family friend, let’s call her P, whose husband, turns out, was not very nice.
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