TemporaryPermanent I googled the Maggie O'Farrell book - that first chapter is online www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm/book_number/3732/page_number/3/i-am-i-am-i-am#excerpt
It's blown me away as such a perfect descriptor of the instinct of sensing danger that women have, and the fact that men have no clue that we have (by necessity) developed this instinct.
In this extract, the Policeman would be represented by Jolyon Maugham - a man belittling and disbelieving a woman who knows instinctively she was in danger.
"So," the policeman says, leaning heavily on his papers, "you went for a walk, you met a man, you walked with him, he was a bit peculiar, but then you got home okay. Is that what you're telling me?"
"He put," I say, "the strap of his binoculars around my neck."
"And then what?"
"He ..." I stop. I hate this man with his thick eyebrows, his beery paunch, his impatient stubby fingers. I hate him more, perhaps, than the man beside the tarn. "He showed me some ducks on the lake."
The policeman doesn't even try to hide his smile. "Right," he says, and shuts his book with a snap. "Sounds terrifying."
How should I have articulated to this policeman that I could sense the urge for violence radiating off the man, like heat off a stone? I have been over and over that moment at the desk in the police station, asking myself, was there anything I could have done differently, anything I might have said that would have changed what happened next?
I could have said: I want to see your supervisor, I want to see the person in charge. I would do this now, age forty-three, but then? It didn't occur to me it was possible.
I could have said: Listen to me, that man didn't hurt me but he will hurt someone else. Please find him before he does.
I could have said that I have an instinct for the onset of violence. That, for a long time, I seemed to incite it in others for reasons I never quite understood. If, as a child, you are struck or hit, you will never forget that sense of your own powerlessness and vulnerability, of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, in the space of a breath. That sensibility will run in your veins, like an antibody. You learn fairly quickly to recognise the approach of these sudden acts against you: that particular pitch or vibration in the atmosphere. You develop antennae for violence and, in turn, you devise a repertoire of means to divert it.
Incredible writing.