Pauline Melville  'I looked English; it was a relief to write
stories that expressed the other side' portrait of pauline
melville Pauline Melville. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe  Twenty
years ago, Pauline Melville was violently attacked in her north
London flat by a man on licence from Broadmoor. As she fought
for her life, she imagined how it would feel to be the one
breaking the rules. "Even at the time, I understood what it was
like to be him," she recalls of the night in Highbury when she
awoke to find an intruder in her bedroom. "I felt how powerful
it is when someone discards all the laws you live by to do the
most outrageous things. It wasn't that it was admirable – but it
was fascinating."  After the attacker was caught, she
fictionalised the event in a chilling tale, "You Left the Door
Open". Its narrator is a cabaret artist – as Melville then was.
But the terror of the woman's prolonged struggle, attempted
bargaining, sexual assault and eventual escape through a garden
window, is framed by myth and myst