It’s when she loses stylistic control that her voice begins to grate. It would be better if Perriam avoided sentences like, ‘Physically, she was standing here in Kilburn, but her mind and thoughts were back in Belgrave road.’ Or: ‘Now she’s so ecstatic, she reminds me of those homeless bods who sit huddled on the pavement and almost have an orgasm if someone tosses them a fiver.’
In general, though, Perriam is adept at evoking sudden gleams of hope born of fantasy and their inevitable extinction. One, ‘Charlotte Elizabeth’, reverses this formula, and it works well too. Each story is based upon a psychological truth and sometimes Perriam stretches the bounds of probability and good taste to create her paradigms, but she does draw some convincing characters and poignant situations.
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