Nia was too beautiful to be in a psychiatric ward. That’s what everyone secretly felt, including the blunt, unsentimental nurses. She was willowy and dark-eyed—not just blandly attractive like teenagers can be. Her parents had delayed signing her into the ward on a section for as long as possible. They couldn’t bear the thought that their beautiful girl was going mad.
It was Nia’s younger sister who used to be the special one, with a gift for the piano that had no precedent in the family. There weren’t any family precedents for what would happen to Nia either. As a child, she had been neither unusually pretty nor particularly unhappy. But adolescence can precipitate unexpected metamorphoses. In Nia, it created a transfixing physical gift and unleashed a terrible mental flaw.
At first her parents thought it was merely a teenage phase. Nia had become aware of the effect she had on schoolmates and teachers. She would either preen under the attention or become twitchy and resentful. It scarcely seemed to be unnatural behaviour—not at first. She would spend hours in her bedroom or stay out late with her boyfriend in Cardiff. Her school reports began to slide. These weren’t excessive problems for an adolescent, especially not for one who had come to realise that people viewed her as special.
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