An Austrian woman, a tourist in London, got chatting to some youths aged fourteen (fourteen!) to seventeen, they seemed to her friendly and she went for a walk with them. Which was a bit naive of her, perhaps, but it was daylight, and she probably thought of them as children (she is thirty-two herself, it said) and being a foreigner she probably didn’t understand their conversation too well, or read the signs in their body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc., for they must have been nudging and winking at each other, exchanging glances, sniggers, sotto voce comments. They lead her to some deserted spot where they stripped her and rapped her , ‘repeatedly’ the newspaper report said, then flung her naked into a canal, though she pleaded with them not to, and told them she couldn’t swim – which probably saved her life, actually, because she could, and managed to drag herself out of the canal on the other side. I pictured her, sobbing and shivering, bruised and bleeding, streaked with mud and slime, staggering along the towpath until she found somebody to help her. What struck me was that she said she survived this ghastly ordeal by ?separating her mind from her body as much as she could? . I wonder what Ralph Messenger would make of that. It seems to me a good argument for dualism.
From the book ‘Thinks’, by David Lodge
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