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The chapter opens with a first‑person monologue titled “The Devil’s Wife.” The speaker describes a coworker she dubs “the Devil,” a man who watches the office women like dirt, is sarcastic, rude, and never flirts. He eventually asks her out; in his car he smokes two cigarettes, bites her breast, and uses foul language before entering her sexually. He tells her “We’re the same,” after which she feels a swoon in her soul. They drive to the woods, where she is forced to bury a doll, and she goes “mad for the sex.” Their affair leads them to quit their jobs, choosing between the woods or “playgrounds, fairgrounds, coloured lights in the rain.” She wanders alone, feeling tailed, describing herself with stone‑tongue and black‑slate eyes.
The narrative then shifts to a segment titled “MEDUSA.” Medusa recounts flying over the wood where the doll was buried, remembering being covered in mud, carrying a spade, and being locked away. She says no one liked her hair or speech, that “the Devil held my heart in his fist and squeezed it dry.” She writes to him daily in a private code, hoping after twelve or fifteen years they’ll be free on the open road, but realizes “life means life” and feels she is dying inside. She identifies herself as the Devil’s wife, claiming it makes her worse, and howls in her cell, questioning whether Hell exists now that the Devil is gone.
A frantic “BIBLE” section follows, with the speaker denying involvement in an unspecified crime, demanding a Bible, a lawyer, a vicar, TV crew, journalist, shrink, MP, and pleading it isn’t her. She repeats “Can’t remember, not in the room” many times, emphasizing uncertainty or denial.
In “NIGHT,” she speaks of a fifty‑year night, listing curses—suffer, monster, burn in Hell—and promises to speak in the morning, ending with “Amen.”
Finally, in “APPEAL,” she enumerates imagined forms of execution—stoning, hanging, shaving, injection, chopping, tongue removal, throat cutting, gunshot, hammer, knife—questioning what she did to “us all, to myself” when she was the Devil’s wife.
Throughout, the chapter interweaves the Devil’s Wife’s traumatized recollections, Medusa’s locked‑away perspective, and frantic denials, illustrating a pattern of abuse, confinement, and existential pleading.