Chapter 1: Albi

I watch the cream and red train disappear slowly around the long bend. The last I see of Jane is her hand sticking out of the window, her fingers spread out like the ribs of a broken fan. I stare along the empty line until the noise of the train dies away and the rails no longer rumble and the humming wires fall silent, and then for some time after. I turn and walk through the dark station and out onto the dazzling dust area in front.
It is midday and very hot and the white dust is endless. I stop, shadowless and blind, aware suddenly of the space all around me, aware that I do not have to do what I intended to do when she left, the thing I promised myself I would do for her, so that she can return, the one big thing. I stare up at the enormous sun.
Then I walk quickly to the car and, instead of getting in and driving back up into the hills, I take out my bag and walk towards the centre of town.

We walked up this road eighteen months ago, rucksacks on our backs (Jane’s was new and she wore it awkwardly), hand in hand, distant. We had left our trunks at the station.

As we passed this little house, I exclaimed ‘Yvonne de Galais’ house, that le grand Meaulnes used to stand outside!’ and turned to her, laughing. She smiled a thin smile.

We stayed, that first night, at this hotel, an old place superficially modernised with plate glass door and formica desk. We sat on the bed, beneath the aged flowered wallpaper and the picture of Jesus, staring across the red roofs to the hills, green, grey and white. I was excited, saying I hoped we’d find a place soon so we could start preparing the ground to be ready for spring:
‘Shallots can go in in February, you know. And there’s still time to sow broad beans. If you start behind, you never catch up. Imagine – our own place, growing our own food. Two acres and a cow, Cobbett says that’s all you need – and that’s to feed a family! Of course we’ll have goats instead. They eat anything. And you can freeze goats’ milk, but not cows’ – something to do with the cream.’
And on and on. Jane sat in silence. Then she got up quickly, went into the bathroom and was sick. Maybe we should have turned round and gone back then. But we’d emigrated, given away everything we couldn’t carry, were making a fresh start. And for me there was more to it than that.
The next day we caught the bus up into the hills, to buy a place, to live, to be free. Within two months we had moved into our own house, with our own land, our own vines. And I had planted the shallots, late.

‘You do still love me, don’t you?’ Her last words as the train began to move, her eyes searching my face. Or maybe memorising.
‘Of course I do. Close the door.’

At the building site a crane turns slowly across the sky. An orange crane, a blue sky, the orange and blue complementary colours, of the same intensity, shapes that vibrate against each other; when I screw up my eyes I can’t tell which is in front of which – I can fancy the shape of the crane to be an absence of blue, a cut-out revealing the orange beyond as it turns slowly, a moving absence. But what, then, is the orange? How strange to be alone! To stop spontaneously, to follow my nose, not having to explain or make sense of things, with Jane not here.

The train will be crossing the plain of Gaillac; she will be looking out over endless rows of soft green vines, where the woad once grew that built the towers of Toulouse, long ago. Pastel.

And now I reach the anchor, the huge anchor set on a plinth, eighty miles from the sea. I sniff it to see if I can smell the sea. It smells of iron and heat. How fierce the sun is! I cross the park and plunge into the public baths.

  *         *         *

I stand in the white-tiled cubicle and let the hot water beat on me until I am almost senseless. Endless hot running water – imagine what it is like to someone who draws his water from a well and heats it in a black polythene bag in the sun.
I remember reading of South American women moved from squatters’ shacks into apartments, showering a dozen times a day, astonished at this miracle, not knowing where it came from, not realising that, unlike a miracle, they would have to pay for it with more than faith.

At last I come to, and wash myself voluptuously, moving into and out of the hot cascade. I examine my hands, enlarged and roughened by hard work, no longer the hands of a student, an academic, a bureaucrat. I look at the scabs – each the fading record of an incident; at the scars – intensifying with time, as if growing confident of their permanence, fixing events. I feel my broadened shoulders and my thickened arms, the product of two years of carpentry, eighteen months on the land. At thirty I have grown into myself, filled the shape I was meant to be, ready at last to take my place with the other men of my family.

But now I have become hard and stiff. So much for the healthy outdoor life. Thoreau writes that the farmer, that image of the healthy man, is not healthy, because he has lost his elasticity; he has become an overworked buffalo, stiff leather in stiff leather. And Jane and I have become ox-like, starving our imaginations, blinkering our visions to the narrow world of our house and land. She is right to go back to London; not just to earn the money we need, but for her own sake. And I am right to stay: for I must remain within this small compass until there is a resolution. And Thoreau’s prescription for the farmer? “It would do him good to be thoroughly shampooed to make him supple”. I apply the soap thickly to the sponge and rub myself all over. As I wash my soft, white places, I remember the softness of her body, our nakedness together, even in that last, fear-filled grappling. We have never been apart. As the water pours onto my head, drips like tears from my eyelashes, I realise the seriousness of what we have done; that what seemed a few hours ago sensible and rational, is a leap off the edge. We have acted as if we believe in fate. I wonder if we do. I grip the sponge and whisper her name.

I wash my hair, shave, clean my teeth, dry myself, put on white cotton trousers, a white collarless shirt, sandals. And – as I comb my long hair in the misted, rubbed-clean mirror – Thoreau’s definition of health? “One sensible to the finest influence; he who is affected by more or less electricity in the air”. Ah.
I stuff my dirty clothes into my bag, step out of the steamy cubicle into the cool, echoey building, and go out into the full heat of the sun.

  *         *         *

Nothing moves. I can feel the surface of my damp hair crisping in the heat. The town sleeps, coshed by the sun; or spellbound. In front of me the war memorial, a triumphal red brick arch tattooed all over with the hundreds of names of the dead, set in rectangles of sharp white gravel and beds of vermilion flowers, bounded by low dark box hedges exact- ly clipped, a double row of black cypresses leading to and from it. The wide square, Di Chirico shadowed, empty. Nothing moves.

Except behind the buttressed walls of the vast red cathedral that rises hallucinatingly above and shadows the town. Within, the level of blood rises slowly, gurgling – then spouts suddenly from gargoyles, bursts out through windows, pours down the walls darkening with crimson the scarlet brick, floods the narrow streets that now echo with screams and the crackle of fire, bursts in a foaming wave from the narrow streets, surges across the square, laps around the bases of the still black cypresses. I hold my breath as the roots eagerly suck in the blood. The tops of the cypresses, at first still, begin to vibrate, shiver – then burst open, flower, with a soft white oozing that shapes, re-shapes then fixes into the forms of heads. There is a head on the top of each of these black cypresses, and each the head of a hero. My heroes, the heroes of my life: long-haired and shaven-headed; bearded and fresh-faced; composed and falling apart; gazing ecstatically still and chattering matily; singing; yelling angry obscenities; mouthing endless concentrated monologues – altogether a welter and babble of noise and movement that somehow makes sense, that is – my world. I gaze enraptured.

And then the tall orange crane turns slowly through the blue sky; the hook descends and lifts the great anchor high into the sky, turns again and the anchor rattles down and, with its arrowed barb, hooks under the arch and lifts. The arch, on its circular pedestal, rises, brick foundations falling, revealing a black emptiness; and down it swirls the blood, with maelstrom twist, gurgles, and is gone. The heads are silenced and stilled, turned to stone … begin to topple … smash to white gravel. The cypresses shiver and then are still. I close my eyes. “Oxidise the water-spouts”, I murmur; “stuff boudoirs with the fiery powder of rubies”. Such things I see, inside my head!

Out there, a creaking sound. I open my eyes. Everything – arch, anchor, crane – is in its given, habitual place. A cyclist in a big cap is cranking slowly across the square. A grey shutter squeaks open and a fat-bellied man in a blue vest looks blearily out, scratches himself, yawning. The first car, a Dauphine, patched and particoloured like a circus car, appears in the street. The pendulum resumes and the clock ticks on.

Was it vision? Memory? Premonition? Or imagination, simply, long buried, emerging …

Smartly dressed figures appear and walk purposefully with briefcases. The streets fill with cars and motor cycles and the air grows blue with petrol fumes. Slim, trim shop assistants in white blouses wind open window shutters. A clock strikes twice. And then another, deeper. I run my fingers through my dried hair. Jane will be in Toulouse, waiting for the Paris train. I go to the car, stow my bag and walk into town, a tourist.

Chapter 2: The River

I go straight to the record shop and stare through the window at the record.

‘How can you even think of buying a record, Kris,’ Jane had said when I pointed it out to her; ‘that’s a month’s petrol.’ It was released the month we arrived.
‘But I always buy his records.’
‘You always used to. Past tense. Those days are over. This is the real world.’
‘But he’s the real world.’
‘Grow up.’

I’ve waited eighteen months. I walk in, buy it, hold it, tense myself for the accusing voice. It doesn’t come. She isn’t here. I am here on my own. This afternoon I am living as if I am free.
I look around. The shop has changed a lot since I first came in ten years ago. The proprio is the same, but his once wild hair and shaggy beard are now trimmed to a perfumed neatness, his granny glasses replaced by executive gold rims, the saggy rainbow sweater discarded for a tight Fair Isle slipover, his whirling energy constrained to a nervous fastidiousness. The white paint, the gaudy posters, the scrawled messages are gone; now there is olive hessian and classical record sleeves on the walls. Albinoni plays; then it was Leo Ferré. And I was a boy with short hair and cycling shoes nervously buying a record I had heard playing in the youth hostel. “Le Temps de Vivre”, by Georges Moustaki. I leave, clutching Blood on the Tracks.

        *         *         *

I pass the smart shops. The patisserie, its cakes so carefully made, so highly finished – enormous red strawberries glowing through a magnifying glaze – that they resemble works of art more than food. The charcuterie, where thick sauces and gelatin moulds disguise animal and vegetable origins. The parfumerie, with its exotic and alluring scents, unhuman smells to swathe, disguise, transmute the human body. The magasin de mode’s window of gorgeous fabrics draped upon impossible figures. Bourgeois France, in which everything, it seems, passes through a stage of artificiality (conscious mind? cultural sensibility?) before it is consumed.
How that intrigued me! I was ambling along, a boy, eating a pêche – a cake shaped like a perfect bum; I was sinking my teeth into the soft pink cheeks – all those years ago, when an attractive woman came out of this shop, clutching a large dress bag, her eyes bright with pleasure at her purchase (I imagined her trying it on), smiled absently at me as she passed, her perfume wrapping round me. Without thinking I turned and followed her. She wore no stockings, had slim brown legs, walked quickly in high-heeled sling-back shoes. Beautiful brown hair with blonde highlights, smooth suntanned skin. She was slim and sleek and wonderfully middle-aged. I followed her without her knowing.

She reached her car, a white Citroën DS (déesse, yes), and, as she opened the door looked up and saw me watching her, half hidden. A frown passed across her face, followed by a smile – not directed at me but up, at the sky. Then she looked very directly at me. I was paralysed. Not frozen – no Medusa, she – but as paralysed as if she had opened her blouse and stood bare breasted in front of me. Then she turned and got into the car and turned the key. And it wouldn’t start. She tried again. And again. I had an age in which to do something, if there was anything to do. I just watched. At last the engine roared into life and she drove away, her hand through the window giving a flutter of a wave, and then she was gone. I started after her helplessly, then turned, feeling strangely empty, and resumed my life.
Often I would remember, and imagine alternative possibilities, each of them forking ever further from my existing life into an entirely different present.

Such are my memories of bourgeois France. Now I live in peasant France. And I need to remember why.

        *         *         *

An untidy bulk backs out of the bookshop, blocks my path, steps back into me, whirls round crying:
‘Boun Diou!’ Pieter often slips into patois when surprised; I still don’t know whether from a genuine empathy with his peasant neighbours, or something wished for. Surprise is replaced by delight as he pumps my hand:
‘Kris! How are you?’ The rolled ‘r’ and the short ‘yu’ distinctively South African.
‘Not bad. And you?’
‘Good, good.’ He taps the fat book he is holding, La Terre d’Oc. ‘Fascinating. The parallels of land and belief, form and idea in a place. That bloody fortress, for example,’ he points at the cathedral, ‘every brick made with the blood of the broken Cathars. One day that blood will flow again, out of the bricks.
‘And the springs – do you know of them, the resurgences? Even the name. Pure cold springs that bubble into the bed of the Tarn. Imagine, within the muddy, thick, warm river those separate, cold, pure streams. And hard, that water, hard and clear. The perfect image of the Other Way, Our Way. And they have their effect – the river clears as it flows downstream. Does the Mississippi, or the Seine? No – but our river does. Parallels, you see.
‘But you’re alone – where’s Jane?’ I will have to get used to this question, invent the appropriate response for each questioner. He listens, his lined, tanned face grave beneath the grey hair, says:
‘Women live in the present – they see things as they are, not as they might be. And she sees that she has no home – she needs a home. But you have a vision. Now you must be strong, stronger than you have ever been. Work with all your strength. Make that vision a reality. Turn the damaged and neglected into a home, the wilderness into a garden. Then she can return.’ We shake hands and he turns, then calls over his shoulder:
‘Come and see us, soon. Hendrika likes to see you.’
‘Sure.’ And I walk on, wondering if it is what I want, any of what he said. The path leads, ineluctably, to the river.

        *         *         *

I walk slowly down the steps, between the stones, into the noise, and stand, my sandalled feet an inch above the milky brown river. It is not so much the speed of the river I notice – although that’s impressive, as a toppled tree speeds past, a bird still and sharp on its topmost twig – as its size. A hundred yards wide, of unknown depth; what volume of water? What power. The water piles against and divides around the bridge piers. The surface is marked by swirls and ribbons of movement and small conical holes like holes in mud. And are there really springs, bubbling springs and threads of clear water? The mill remains, empty now and boarded up. The terrace where we sat at long tables under the bamboo lattice is now a desolation of rubbish.

It was a youth hostel when I came, alone, a temporary one, open for the summer, run by a group of students from Paris. They boiled cauldrons of apples and we helped ourselves. They played chess and argued and drank, and giggled over small, shared cigarettes and caressed and – I suppose – made love. There was the pretty gamine with long hair and big eyes who would pass hours motionless and then instigate a sudden collective madness. There was the serious girl with short hair who kept it all going. The patient, methodical, bespectacled man, and the man all the girls fell for and who, you insisted, wasn’t handsome but was, you conceded, attractive.
And the non-stop record player – songs of Cuba, Satie, Charley Patton, Bach, Dylan, Nina Simone, Congo drums, Brassens, Misa Luba, Monteverdi, Reggianni, Miles Davis, Milhaud, and more, and more. Most of it music I’d never heard, that I’ve only identified piece by piece in the years since, that I’ll still be identifying years hence; the music of those three days (as I rested up) exists in a place inside me, waiting to be heard again to be recalled. Eighteen months later I imagined those students taking part in les événements in Paris. As I watched the savagery of the CRS on TV I hoped they were alright. Yes, the one I fell for was the longhaired girl; and the one I thought I should like, the shorthaired.

Abroad for the first time, cycling to the Mediterranean, crossing that line, that exact line that separates North and South, into a different world. I left the world I knew and entered a different world. The elastic connecting me to home stretched (how I missed home!), and snapped. (My bike broke miles from a bike shop, was repaired by a blacksmith – a different world.) I swam in the Mediterranean. I bought red espadrilles for the girl I wrote to every day. I spent three weeks in Provence and the Midi, in Roman Midi, in the Midi of Van Gogh and Cézanne and Petrarch and the Troubadours and the Cathars and olives and vines, that reminded me of Greece although I had never been to Greece, that I would go to Greece to find; in a different culture, in ‘culture’.

I arrive in Albi, at what I think is the last stop on my sickle swing through the South, replete and, it seems, complete. I’m sitting here, at a long bench, beneath a vine-covered trellis, after a meal I’ve made myself, of rice, onions, tomatoes (those sweet, juicy, misshapen southern tomatoes) and cheese (gruyère, all melted in), followed by goats’ cheese and baguette. There is coffee in a glass by my hand, the hard sugar lump dissolving, and a glass of wine. It is evening, dark and warm, a Southern evening. The air is soft on my skin. The stars sparkle. I listen to the river’s soft flow, and watch the last light fade from the sky. I am cycling fit, full of the books I’ve  been reading (La Nausée, Parôles, Thus spoke Zarathustra), the experiences I’ve had (Mont-St-Victoire, La Fontaine de Vaucluse, the girls at La Ciotat). My diary (which is now ‘a journal’) is open in front of me. I am surrounded by activity that I am not part of, conversation I do not understand. I am ready to reflect on my adventure. I am warm and full and rather pleased with myself. Click. A new record. Georges Moustaki. “Le Temps de Vivre”. I feel very, very happy. I write:
“I am surrounded by strangeness and activity, and I am at its still centre; in it but not of it. I am alone and unafraid. I am free.” And then suddenly I know what I have to do. I have to go on. The next day, instead of heading north, retracing my journey here, I cycle up into the hills, into silence, towards nothing. The adventure I thought was ending is just beginning – or rather it is beginning a new, more dangerous phase. When I returned to England I gave the girl the red espadrilles and broke off our relationship.

Such moments happen to you when you are twenty. At thirty, maybe you have to make them happen. I look down at the thick water. I imagine the steps continuing, step by step, to the bed of the river. To the spring, the resurgence.
I step down, into the water. A smell of mud and weed rises. My foot sinks through the surface, disappears, and then grounds on the invisible step. The water is cool. It separates around my ankle. I step down my other foot, deeper, the water to my calf, cold now, tugging at my leg more urgently; my sandal touches, slips, I almost fall, recover, set down my foot. Step down again. And again. Each step takes me away from the bank, into the river, down, out, the water rearing up, filling my vision, the noise of it filling my ears, blocking out everything else, pulling at me. I stand, waist deep, divided at the tan t’ien, half in water, half in air, exactly between. Now. Decide. To descend, step by step, into the cool, muddy water, into the dark, descend into the stream, the silence, the single flow, seeking the spring. Or climb back, out of the buoyant water into the light, the air, the weight, and all that bloody complication …

Turn. Return. How the water plucks at me, clings to me, pulls me down, drags me in! Step by step, heavy with water, slipping, almost panicking, I heave myself up, out of the water, up the steps and stand at last on the stones, the water draining from me, fizzing to nothing on the hot setts, the quayside solid beneath my feet, the air hot around me. I’m panting, and shaking, shocked at what I did and have almost done. I stand and wait. Patient as an animal. Until I have somewhere to go, until a destination emerges into my mind. And then I set off, not towards the car, no, but across the bridge, over the river, towards the boutique, wondering suddenly if Sylvie will be there.

Chapter 3: Sylvie

Sylvie squeals with delight, cries:
‘Kris! At last!’ as I push open the door, the sheep bell ringing, and step into the shop. She throws her arms round my neck and her body melts against me. She is small and feels soft and smells sweet and I can’t resist kissing her hair. She pulls away, eyes shining, saying:
‘I’ll be with you in two ticks,’ moves rapidly round the shop switching off spotlights, stopping the tape (Ziggy Stardust), checking windows and doors, pinching out incense sticks – their fragrance hangs in the air and a thin line of smoke rises and twists from each and then stops – pushing her tarot cards and detective novel into her overstuffed bag. I stand, mystified, as she moves quickly, energy released, a creature suddenly liberated, in and out of the sunlight, talking all the time:
‘I knew someone would come. What a day! Claudine abandoned me!! I was beginning to doubt – no, not really, but if you hadn’t … I’m glad it’s you,’ a quickly flashed smile, steady eyes for a moment. ‘I’m really excited. Oh, here’s the money, I sold two salt boxes,’ of wood, that I had made and painted. It’s more than the price of the record. ‘What’s the record? Oh, it’s brilliant. “Tangled up in blue”,’ she warbles. ‘I really sweated to sell them – remember that, won’t you?’ A West Country softness to her voice, short skirt, thin blouse knotted at her midriff, shiny skin, long hair pinned up in arabesques and folds, with just enough wisps floating free to look negligent. ‘Why’s half of you wet?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Don’t tell me. I’ll have something to fit you at the flat. Okay, I’m ready. Yes, Cinders, you shall go to the Ball,’ at the mirror, staring at her reflection then shaking herself free and clattering in her Minnie Mouse shoes to the door.
She locks the door and sighs, as if she is locking the door of a prison from the outside, and turns, free.
‘But …’ I say.
‘Shsh,’ she says, and looks down at me from the top step, waiting. The moment stretches, tears are at the edge of her eyes, when at last I remember:
‘May the humble Bernart de Ventadour escort the Lady Eleanor to the feu St Jean?’ Her face lights up, she courtesies:
‘The Lady is pleased,’ she says, gravely, and we walk a few steps along the street in stately formality, then she laughs and squeezes my arm and lays her head against my shoulder and whispers:
‘I need this.’
So do I.

It is Midsummer, the eve of St John’s day, traditionally a night of bonfires, a tradition abandoned by the locals, revived by Edvard and now, after three years, the main festival and gathering of the incomers. And I had forgotten.
‘Jane’s gone, then.’
‘Yes. Midday. Glad to get away from me.’
‘Not from you. From this place maybe, especially from up there, your situation, but not from you.’
‘Mm. And Jean-Jacques?’
‘Sodded off. Starts muttering about “sitting beauty in his lap” and “finding her bitter”, and needing “to return to the soil, to seek a duty, to embrace rugged reality …” Then he sodded off.’
‘Rimbaud.’
‘What?’
‘He’s quoting Rimbaud.
‘Who the hell’s Rambo?’
‘Poet. Gave up writing at 19, became a gun runner and slave trader, died at 37.’
‘Brilliant – Jean-Jacques’s forty, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Rimbaud was a great poet.’
‘Bully for him. I’m pissed off with being a muse, I really am, I really, really am!’ Her voice is low, intense, angry. I want her to let go of my arm but she clings fiercely. I’m relieved when we reach her flat.

        *         *         *

‘How about these?’ A pair of her trousers. How gorgeous to wear them. Far too small. I have to settle for a pair of Jean-Jacques’. She goes for a shower.

I look around, wondering again at all the things she has collected, or rather, accumulated. Sixties records – no record player – American books, French magazines, brass bells from India, mandalas from Tibet, worry beads from Greece, slippers from Morocco, postcards from everywhere, badges – a waistcoat covered in them, worthy of a Peter Blake painting – teak elephants, pottery incense holders, road lamps – red petrol, yellow battery – a white seagull that bobs slowly up and down when I pull the string, clockwork tin toys from Eastern Europe – a cymbal-playing bear, an acrobat; embroidered butterflies from China, Japanese paper kites. And the only time she’d left England was to come here. The walls are yellow, the ceiling blue, the shelves and chairs and table and doors and window frames are inexpertly painted in primary colours. It looks, I suddenly realise, like the room of a child living on its own.
An attic flat in the centre of Albi in a run-down block looking out over the red roofs. Maybe we should have stayed in Albi. Maybe we went one step too far. Because Jane too loves France. The difference between us is that I love being an alien in France, she loves being at home here. As I was experiencing being comfortable with solitude for the first time, she was here for a year before university, feeling at home for the first time. We love different aspects of the same place; we love the same place for different reasons: therefore we love different places? The same thing experienced from two different angles is two different things. Is this true? It’s as if it’s true, so it might as well be.

‘Now,’ Sylvie says, ‘what shall I wear?’ Wrapped in a towel, hair wet and straggly, the shine washed from her, her face tired, she looks quite plain. Sylvie?
‘Come on!’ she commands.
‘I know nothing about clothes,’ I protest.
‘Not good enough. You don’t try. Feu St Jean. Midsummer. Fire!’ She disappears and returns in a red dress, yellow shawl, large straw hat, radiant smile. She parades, crossing and recrossing in front of the window, turning round in the light, the dress crackling around her.
‘No? No. Okay. The longest day. Fertility.’ A green dress, long and simple, with a fitted bodice. A flower headband. She is slender and willowy, she looks like Guinevere, the Guinevere who never had children, waiting.
‘Night?’ Her face dead white, her eyes cold and remote as stars, a black dress with a red slash across the heart.
‘No!’
‘Too much, eh? Come on, there is something you want me to be.’ I daren’t even think. She pulls the dress over her head and stands in bra and pants, leaning against the door jamb, inspecting her fingernails, beginning to be bored. Stray hairs are trapped by the elastic of her pants. Her belly round and smooth. She spots something and walks over and moves a magazine. Her attention caught, she begins tidying up; or, rather, moving things around. Forcing books onto overstuffed shelves, throwing shoes into corners, making heaps of clothes. She does it impatiently, as if things bore her – she often says ‘we have too many things’, surrounds herself, buries herself in them. She moves lightly, her feet flexing expressively. Her skin is smooth, and although she is suntanned, she looks pale, as if the flesh beneath her skin is white. Her long hair flows over her face when she leans forward, hiding it. She finds a book of Jean-Jacques’. She stares at it with great intensity then walks quickly to the window, drops it out, into the river, and turns back into the room, dusting her hands, smiling in triumph.
‘You should be an actress.’ I say. She laughs:
‘I am, I was. Better than you might think, my friend and I. You’ll know her, she’s famous now, gorgeous, you probably fancy her, maybe you’ve wanked over her photo. It’s the eyes, men’s eyes, they strip you till you’re either raw or hard. It’s not right. I perform my life. No spotlight till I find what I want to do.’
‘Light.’
‘Perfect.’ She kisses me, her hands on my shoulders. Her lips are soft. I feel the heat from a body that is very close but not touching. My hands hang helplessly. She is gone for a long time. She comes in very slowly. She is wearing a long dress of thin muslin. Her face is white, with gold and silver dust sparkling on her cheeks and forehead. In her hair, which hangs long and straight, there is a large gold slide that frames her face like a halo. A moon pendant hangs down between her breasts. Long dark eyelashes. Her eyes dark pools in which two spots of light glimmer like pearls in the depths. She advances slowly, gravely. She is from another world. But it is in this one. As she reaches for the yellow shawl she says, her voice husky:
‘The stuff’s over there – do you mind skinning up? I’m feeling a bit shaky.’ I reach for the Capstan tin. As I soften the resin over the match flame, I hear a song in my head. From Ziggy Stardust. As if the tape has been playing on in my head from the time Sylvie stopped it in the shop. I make a strong one. They are French papers, ungummed, and I have to tear off a narrow strip to make a fibrous edge that will stick. The tape has reached the final track. I light up and hand her the joint. She takes a long, deep drag, and holds the smoke in, eyes closed. She breathes out, sighing:
‘That’s better,’ opens her eyes, pearls become diamonds. She passes me the joint. The words I hear, the last track, time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth, you suck on a finger, another finger, then the cigarette, running through my head, “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”, as I inhale, she shakes her head, as I breathe out says softly, in time to the words: ‘such fools, what we do to ourselves,’ and holds me gently as I burst into tears.

Read the whole book in MY BOOKS.