The wireless age #46: Parallel worlds

As he got older it seemed that chances to tell his story, his life story, had diminished.  Not that he preferred speaking above listening or particularly liked the sound of his own voice; but if someone was genuinely interested, if he felt that in his bones, or better still in his heart, then he would happily talk for hours and hours.  Unexpectedly he had been given a chance to tell it all in the greatest detail to someone who was infinitely interested in how he had arrived at the point in time at which they met.  And so it had been for her too.  It was a gift that neither of them would ever be less than deeply grateful for.

But now it felt like his story was on hold again, or even that it had gone back on itself.  He couldn’t help wishing that he could go on telling the story to the woman who had become part of it, could go on filling in the gaps and creating new chapters; chapters bursting with the life that somehow seemed to have slipped away from his.

It was chance that took him in the direction of her ghost.  He was attending a day of seminars at the university where she had once been a student.  Typically he had decided to turn chance into a kind of pilgrimage.  He would rather see the house in which she had once lived than the blue-plaqued or unmarked residence of any of his favourite writers.  Besides, she was his favourite writer, and this city a part of the story of her life.  She told him once the name of the street on which she had lived, but it was at the overgrown fringes of his memory now and he couldn’t pluck it from its hiding place.  He would just have to hope that he bumped into it and underwent a sudden jolt of recognition.

Late arriving, he had to run from the car park to the building in which the seminars were taking place in order to pick up a parking permit, then run back to place it on view.  So he was breathless as he twice crossed the campus, much changed since her time, he guessed.  But there would still be buildings here she had been in, and around them streets which she had walked down.  He wanted to breathe the same air as her for a while, albeit displaced by time.

In the lobby of the building he was visiting he spotted a colleague and knew that for a time he would have to put all thoughts of pilgrimage aside.  The seminar was delivered against the background hum of ventilators.  He fought to let neither the hum nor the dryness of the lecturers’ content send him to sleep; went further by making sufficient salient points to underline his presence, his engagement even.  As the other attendees – the majority of whom were women – voiced their opinions, he gave them the once over, took in their characters.  None even came close to what she was, to having what she had.  None of the people in any of the rooms in which he habitually found himself had it.  As so often he wondered how he had ended up in this world.  He felt miscast, misplaced.  If only he could step from one reality into another, he would do so.  But they had decided not to merge their parallel worlds.  He was stuck in his and she in hers.  Watching rain fall silver in the white light of the sun outside the window, all he could do was take his mind to her.  He imagined himself into the past, into her world.  Imagined the two of them as fresh and new and unburdened.  Imagined their paths crossing, and making a friendship or a love in bars or halls or a seminar room such as this.  She would have set lecture hall, refectory and bar ablaze, he knew it.  They would rarely if ever have seen her like.  But he also knew that if he really had met her then, he may not have had the visible force of personality to have engaged her attention.  Instead he would have admired her from afar, always debating with himself whether to attempt to bridge the space between them.  It was age which gave him the confidence to do what he had done, to make eyes across the celebratory table at which he first saw her.

He emerged from his bubble and looked at his watch.  Not even half way through.  He was longing for lunch and the afternoon session to be over, so that he could for a time follow her traces and walk around what he thought of as her streets.

At last he was free to go.  He wandered out into the air, breathed in its moisture to replace the dryness in his lungs, and set off walking.  Soon he found himself faced with a path across a common and knowing that at some point she would have walked this way, he walked it too.  Now they had a common in common.  The path was signed Lover’s walk.  It might have been for lovers a long, long time ago, but today – and he imagined it was so in her time too – it was creepily enclosed and disconcerting.  He soon diverted off into a grassy space on whose turf he was sure she would once have sat and stretched out.  And drank and kissed, in a life he could never be a part of.  Seeing a pair of magpies, he thought to himself, I’m confused; she and I have attached so many terms and conditions to the sight of one that I don’t know what two means any more.

He headed back into the streets around the university.  Past redbrick houses with gabled fronts and a redbrick hall of residence, past a yellow brick pub in which he felt sure she would have drunk.  Down a hill and back up, passing a church on the corner, looking off to left and right at the name of each street, searching for that stab of recognition, but though some seemed achingly familiar, none came.  As the rain began to fall again, he gave up, turning back into the campus.  Soon he found himself in front of an old, foursquare redbrick building: the Union.  He knew for sure then that if he trod the steps of its entrance he would cross over with her in space if not time.  A student, a woman, was standing in the doorway.  She took in his approach, as anyone does while waiting and on seeing someone coming towards them.  For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that it was her, that this was where they had arranged to meet; that here was his portal to the parallel world he wished to enter.  But if he kept up this pretence he knew he risked unnerving the waiting woman.  In any case it was going to be perturbing if he walked up the steps and turned about in her face.  But he felt impelled by his pilgrimage to do it; he couldn’t not.  So as he came up one side of the steps he comically made as if he had forgotten something, and came back down the other.  She gave him a look, but that was all.  Just some hare-brained, harmless maths lecturer, she might have thought.

Not far from the union building was a little rectangular pool in which a geometric figure had been set.  Blue-green with copper patina, it looked to be by some contemporary of Henry Moore.  Dawdling on summer days, she must have stood here and gazed upon it.  He watched the rain patter on the viscous-seeming surface of the water and on the lily pads which part-covered the pool.  Perhaps if he span a coin into the air, a piece of silver to break the water’s skin, he could make a wish and that would be his portal.  He flipped ten pence skywards and watched it arc and puncture the water.  Through the settling ripples he saw its resting place, and closed his eyes.  He stretched out his right hand and wished.  He felt her hand brush his, but when he opened his eyes she was gone.

It was only when he got home and dug out a map that he spotted and remembered the street name, and realised with one more pang in his heart that he had driven along her road and had parked just off it.  Had crossed and recrossed it on foot.  Had walked in her steps without knowing that he was.

Mars and Mercury, Tuesday and Wednesday, grace and woe

She had boxed up her love and parried his.  She would no longer cede to his desire, or her own.  With superhuman effort she ignored his endearments when it seemed that mere moments before she had gathered them as posies of flowers smelt and smiled upon.  And the flower she was had closed its petals; would not, could not let him come buzzing at her pollen any longer.

Everything went against him, or so it seemed.  The innocent questions asked which sparked a hailstorm of guilt, the weather itself, the old lover ringing when he did.  Finite time to finish a redecorating job and a sanctimonious neighbour waging a war of attrition being the weights which stretched the main and all the other burdens an ounce, a pound, a stone too far.  Then a television programme about a man living a secret life; its uneasy parallels.  Weights too far.

He sighed.  He knew her reasoning was sound.  But his heart refused to listen to his head, or to the silent screaming in hers.  His alleged grace, her undoubted woe, they had become one.  Intermingled and indivisible.  A transference of substance approximate to the soul or life force or very subtle mind had taken place, an each-way transference.  Together they were something other than what they were apart.  Something both celestial and earthy.  Without her he was neither.  He couldn’t help longing to be stretched out once again upon the rack of their love.

All the old familiar songs began to circle menacingly, their bittersweet threat now intensified beyond his pain barrier – ‘Let me down easy’, ‘Ne me quitte pas’, ‘I want you’, ‘Black cherry’, ‘Love letter’, ‘Take care’, a hundred others, the really desperate ones.  And he knew that whenever he heard them in future, he would be right back in the moments where the angles became pleading and the begging became panic and the thickness in his throat became gasping, tearing sobs.

He was not ready for this.  He didn’t think he would ever be ready for it.  He could only hope that she found that she wasn’t either.  It was the fitful, flickering element of hope which kept him going.  And if that light died, he didn’t know what he would do.  He wished he could replay time from a certain point, make it go differently.  But there were so many things outside his control.  He felt powerless, or at least that his powers were limited.  He couldn’t McCartney a ‘Yesterday’ out of the ether, but there he was still trying to.  And even in the unlikely event that he succeeded, as likely as not it would still do no good.

As much as anything, perhaps more than anything (save for the kisses and the touch of their bodies, save for the words that passed between them then) he would miss the sharing of all the ordinary little everyday things.  But that was exactly the problem – the ordinary little everyday things were hidden inside a bubble of secrecy, and each of the thousands of pieces of knowledge the one held about the other, because they were wrapped in love, might as well have been a splinter threatening to pop it.

Bringing it all back home

Night

When I go to sleep it is with images of you, images of us as we were together.  Naked flames dancing, ashes smouldering, turn and turn the fuel again.  From within the fire I feel you scorch my skin, and watch you flare and burn.

Sometimes too I imagine what we never had the chance to do.  Just one of those things; a summer breeze through a high sash window, your head on my shoulder, mine on yours, our faces upside-down to each other’s as we lie length to length diagonally across the bed listening to Bringing it all back home.  From time to time, lips puzzling with their upside-down conundrum.

To reach sleep I kid myself that there is nothing to worry about, that you’re there.  Sometimes it works.  But when I wake in the night, the first stricken thought I think is that you’re not.  The realisation crushes me and I long to be back under, to be un-conscious.  And when I wake in the morning, you are my first thought then too; you and the not unrelated awareness of my morning glory.  To ease the absence, I take myself in hand, and have you ride me, and say to you the words I know you still long to hear.

Day

The silence is deafening.  It roars and bays and there is no escape from it.  When I put my hands over my ears or try to block out sound through keeping busy, it only shouts all the louder.

I could feel you disappearing again, shrinking from me, from the poison ivy of my words, my company.  The hold we have on each other is strong; it will last till the days we die.  You have had to wrench yourself away, and our flesh is torn where we were joined.  I doubt the wound will ever fully heal.  We will, I think, carry it always.

In the car I ignore the periodic flashing of the engine warning light.  Instead I focus my attention on Blood on the tracks.  Jesus, Bob.  Through the windscreen I see two geese flying high over the harbour, rising with each wing beat as ‘If you see her, say hello’ unfurls.  Stuck in traffic, I watch until they vanish into a pall of cloud, always within kissing distance of each other.  Even as I re-focus on the music, my thoughts wander, in a constant cycle of concentration and drift.  Inevitably I see you both inside the songs, and outside of them, listening along with me.

Somehow I make it through work, alternating immersion in its beige tones with the red raw memory of us.  The day can’t help but die with the drive home, and the requirement to put on another head.

Pall

Mask

The dissembler pretends to be someone he is not. His role requires constant improvisation, a steady forward progress across shifting sands. Every moment he must remake, re-create, modify the personage he is playing, until at last the moment arrives when reality and appearance, the lie and the truth, are one. At first the pretence is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbours, but eventually it becomes a superior – because more artistic – form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are not and what we would like to be.’

‘The Mexican… becomes mere Appearance because of his fear of appearances. He seems to be something other than what he is, and he even prefers to appear dead or nonexistent rather than to change, to open up his privacy.’

– Octavio Paz, The labyrinth of solitude

I remember the night I first wore the mask.  My brother threw a party, between Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night.  He said it was fancy dress.  I assumed that meant Hallowe’en fancy dress.  I turned up as a creature of the underworld; or at least one dressed in black and wearing the mask of a monster.  It was lizard green, with pointed ears, and a wolverine’s muzzle and yellowing teeth set in a blood red maw which resembled the torn flesh of prey.

My brother on the other hand wore a suit, with a thin black tie; until he told me, I didn’t know he was supposed to be James Bond.  You could have come as anything, you doughnut, he said, rolling his eyes.  Thanks for making that clear, 007, I said.  But I was happy as I was, a masked fiend or ghoul; I felt freer, less self-conscious, plus I could see through the eyeholes that I was freaking people out.  I couldn’t keep it on for long, of course – it was airless in there – so periodically I reverted back to human form.

He had emptied out his garden shed, made it into a bar, fairy lit.  It wasn’t apparent where he had put all the stuff that was usually stored inside it.  Midway through the evening I stepped in to top up my glass.  Without the mask on.  Just my brother’s wife and a friend of hers in there.  I was introduced.  From words spoken and looks issued, I could tell the friend was a hunter, a predator even.  Enough had been drunk there in the shed to loosen lips and intimations.  Stone-cold sober, I felt unsettled.  But that wasn’t all I felt.  Confusion; an element of attraction coupled with a greater degree of a feeling it isn’t over-dramatising to describe as repulsion.  I wasn’t used to being deliberately and visibly eaten up like that.  And yet if you’d asked me about my innermost workings and I could have told you in confidence, I would have said that I longed to be eaten up, to be taken in mouth and claw by just such a predator.  But in that pretend-bar, in the presence of my brother’s wife, it seemed misplaced.  There was something odd about it.  I couldn’t put my finger on what.  As soon as I was able, I backed out of the shed.  Put the mask back on, and distance between myself and other people.  Listened to my monstrous breathing rasp through the holes cut in the blood red maw.  When at last I felt sufficiently undead, I took the mask off again.  Craned my neck skyward to watch the fireworks.  Breathed in the cold night air, before exploded gunpowder spread its pall.

It was only much later, remembering back, that I realised the woman standing with my brother’s wife in their fairy-lit garden shed-bar that night was – it transpired – the one with whom 007 had been having an affair.  I was a decoy.  A decoy way too close to the bone.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni *

It started as the loneliest journey.

If only I had reached out my hand and said wait, lie here just a little while longer.  Then she wouldn’t have seen us, then you wouldn’t have turned your face away, then I wouldn’t be feeling this way.  Hollowed out.  Cored.  And then marooned on a motorway.  Following a track I didn’t want to be on.

In an attempt to distract myself from the acid burn of heartache, I played some music, but the sound was dry, deprived of any sweetness, failing to console.  I turned to the radio, to try to enter lives beyond my own, but I couldn’t engage with any of it, with any of them.  So I fell back on listening to the engine, its pitch somewhere between a hum and a roar.  It was all I needed to hear.

On the way up, I had marked the signs, as usual, though on a different route.  A mobile home – let’s call it a caravan – on a flatbed lorry; the gift of all travel, of course.  A pale and fading wash of rainbow.  A Dreamland balloon, though I suppose its shape determines that really I should call it a zeppelin.  A handsome water tower.  The once smart, many windowed chalet-style pub fallen on hard times.  The owners didn’t even think it worth boarding up all those windows.  We could have broken in, you and I, and found a room that would have been ours for however long we needed it.

A final sign, perhaps, once I was with you: the body of a peppered moth, resting its mottled wings in lamp-lit glow on polished wood.  I meant to draw your attention to it, but I did not.  I meant to do and say so many things while I was with you but time and circumstance were against us and we had to keep looking over our shoulders.

On the way back down, I spotted the message you had left.  I couldn’t hear half of it above the engine, above the reflection of its noise from the soundboard of tarmac, but I got the gist.  It was remorse, and it was enough; in any case, I would forgive you anything, just as I believe you would me.  And I already understood how that fear of being found out could trump the fragile state of love.  If I am hollowed out, you are split in two.  There was a break in your recorded voice, a catch in your throat, the whisper of your love.  Tears, I could hear, in your eyes.  Perhaps things would be ok, I thought, perhaps we would get past this latest snake.

My mind was speeding and I was driving fast enough to be pulled over by the police.  I hogged the outside lane, nosed atypically and arrogantly into the back of errant users of my private track until they stood aside.  No-one could compete with me, no-one was foolish enough to try me on the inside.  I was above the law but beneath contempt.  Your no longer quite so secret lover, speeding home, throwing double sixes in his head, climbing ladders, all the way to 100, all the way to a heaven that still he could not give up on.

Those signs – caravan, rainbow, balloon, tower, a place in full view in which to hide from the world – they could signify either way.  All except the moth, which it would be healthier – though possibly not wiser – to see as an insect rather than a sign.  Of course I took them all as for me rather than against me.  For us, not against us.  On the way back, in the dark, the moon occulted, there was nothing to see.  There were no visible signs to determine what the future would bring.

One thing was certain.  It wasn’t the way either of us wanted it to end.

* We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire.

I see you

in the moon
in a moth
in an office desk
in a typewriter and in typos
in specs
in a French pleat
in geometric blackberry earrings and a black polo neck
in vintage cameras and careworn toy monkeys
in a sculpture in the Louvre
in padlocks
in a grain of sand
in – I confess – the heroine of a TV drama, whose leading man is me
in all the books I read, somehow or other
in cake stands
in cricket balls
in five bar gates
in a board game
in the touchpad of a laptop
in the point on a compass that would take me to you
in the name of your county, whenever it is mentioned, whatever the context
in a painting of a landscape through which I know you’ve passed
in heather, bracken and gorse
in mother of pearl
in too many species of bird to mention
in eggs and eggcups and cacti
in blackboards and breadboards
in bowls full of fruit or salad or car keys, screws, coins and sunglasses
in tea
in apples and oranges
in gherkins and piccalilli
in noodles, fine or medium
in mushrooms, darning or otherwise
in fairy rings and votive candles
in tweed jackets and leopardskin coats
in knickers and stockings
in any clock showing ten o’clock at night
in ‘I will survive’ leaking from a car dealership’s speakers
in every love song voluntarily listened to
in a woman with hair as vivid as yours walking her dog
in the car in front of mine
in a bed.

I see you in all of these things, and countless more.
You are the form and function of my mind,
its dynamic and discipline,
acoustics and architecture.
Its supporting structure.
And even when you are no longer there
you will still keep me upright.

Third person omniscient

The omniscient narrator allowed his character’s limited mind to speculate on how all of this had come to pass, letting it wander from the book he was reading into a consideration of whether at points in his life he could have chosen different paths, or whether the paths always chose him, with each step along the way influencing and effectively determining the subsequent choices he thought he was making.  For example, did his wife’s unwillingness to hear a confession of his at the outset of their relationship really make him so unable to speak now, when the need to tell was so much greater?

He had reached a junction, and there before him were as many roads as he cared to imagine, including the volte-face.  He recognised he had failed to achieve the most personal of his ambitions, and he also saw himself as a failure in the career which was visible to other people.  Pricked by the first intimations of morbidity and mortality, he had finally acknowledged both failures to himself and when he looked around at the rest of his life, he realised more forcefully than ever that his remaining vitality was swirling remorselessly down a plughole.  This was an emergency situation.  What did he most want then, in the limited time left to him?  The answer called to him like the Sirens: he wanted to feel again the headiness of falling in love, the total immersion of being in love, and – looking self-critically at a third failure in his life –  he wanted to try preserving the new love better, to make it last, and last gloriously rather than comfortably.  He wanted love to turn his insides out and simultaneously sting and kiss both his skin and his mind until the very end.  He needed to use the organs with which he had been born to their full; needed to live out loud, even if only one other human being saw and heard him doing so.

He looked back at the book and his eyes came to rest on the last words he had read before his mind wandered – words which were in fact the reason his mind had wandered:

‘If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life.  Even if you can’t get together with that person.’

He tested the truth of this in his mind.  It seemed a little trite, from at least a couple of angles.  It was uttered by someone who did not know or had not taken the trouble to imagine what it was to be a parent; someone who also appeared not to have had the experience of being denied the chance to get together with their lover.  Whereas he knew something about it, for he had found someone he loved like that, with his whole heart.  Loving her was both the easiest thing in the world and at times, the hardest, for three strong reasons that the omniscient narrator would not let his character’s wandering mind detail here.  But he could not stop himself from loving her and together they had mostly risen above those obstacles, though each seemed powerless to remove them.  One would have been relatively unproblematic; two might have been workable; three had them tied in inescapable mental knots.

So now he was both where he wanted to be, and not where he wanted to be.  But his vitality and a reason for living had been returned to him and to his wandering mind that was worth any amount of accompanying pain and heartache.  She had indeed been his salvation.

The omniscient narrator, he knew how this was going to end.  But the character who was currently the focus of his narration, he still had no clue at all, and that crafty all-knowing trickster was not letting on.

The actress and the bishop‏

– Hold out your hand.

He did not need to ask which she meant.  Her eyes were on the ring, the episcopal ring, the one which showed that he was wedded to the church.  How quickly she had turned command of the conversation.  His hand was in hers now.  She lowered her lips to kiss the ring.  He felt them burning hot on his cold fingers at the edge of the gold, and as well as the flames which engulfed him he felt the charge of an electric shock throughout his body, a charge that seemed to explode and rearrange every electron and positron of his being.  The look in her eyes as she raised them to his rearranged them all over again.

He was a bishop while she was an actress whose mixture of ballsiness and diplomatic tact meant that she preferred but didn’t insist on being called ac-tor as opposed to ac-tress.  His position gave him a certain immunity from gossip, while she swam in its waters.  As far as society was concerned he was a worldly clergyman and she was an actor with spiritual leanings preparing for her next role as the wife of a bishop.  When she came to take tea at the Palace that first time, the flow of his answers to her theological questions never faltered even as he found himself gazing across the array of cakes at the near-godly perfection of her face.  She noticed his fiddling from the first; the way he couldn’t help availing himself of the deep pockets in his trousers.  Despite his high office, he was, after all, merely a man, and she was all woman.  She could have had her pick of leading men but they conformed to type and soon left her bored and restless.  This holy man wasn’t afraid of the violence of her emotions, had in fact she thought an understanding of it not solely confined to observation.  And – though at the outset he had found this hard to believe – he came to understand that the attraction was two-way.  Closeted in his study one day after tea taken in the public part of the Palace, she got down on her knees before him.  The look on her face as she unhooked and unzipped his trousers and watched his rising cock split the tails of his purple shirt; the reverence with which she sucked him made him feel that he had not striven for earthly status in vain.  He put his hands into the ringlets of her hair and tried to shut out all thoughts of God and sin.  He found it was not hard to do so, for here surely was a heaven on earth to challenge the most ardent believer’s notion of the paradisiacal nature of the afterlife.

And later when he administered the discipline which she subsequently came to expect of him – evangelically administered it as the shapely arch of her body bent over the episcopal desk – he gained a pastoral satisfaction well beyond the righteous glow acquired through ministering to the poor and the needy of the diocese.

In those moments, in the times she teased him to his theological limits, whenever he subsequently remembered their ecstasies and dwelt on the perfect understanding which had grown up between them, he swore that he would give up his see to tend and be tended so, if only she would let him.  But though they discussed it over and over, in the end she always concluded that it was better he stayed with the people who needed him.  She wasn’t going to disappear.  She would commit some quid pro quo time to his ecclesiastical good causes and under its cover they could continue to see each other regularly, though it might never be quite enough for either of them.  Such a realisation sometimes saddened them but love and sex chased the blues and the purple away and afterwards he would remind her of what she had said the very first time she knelt before him.

– Brings a whole new meaning to the word bishopric, doesn’t it?

Lifeline

Today the crack ran.

A silvery crack in the centre of the screen.  At first I thought it was a strand of tinsel somehow come to be stuck in the wiper.  But it wasn’t fluttering in the wind.  It was still.  I remembered the stone in the dark the night before, the suddensharp bang of flinthead against toughened glass.  A crack then, snaking from the point of impact.

As I drove I swear I could see the crack moving.  By journey’s end there could be no doubt.

On successive days I watched it grow, shaken by the car’s vibration, sensing its movement much as you do the minute hand of a clock, or the movement of a ghost just beyond your angle of sight.

I thought I should get something done about it, but I was inert, passive, a passenger in the driver’s seat.  A liver of a life lived through screens.  Let the crack lengthen, I said to myself, and the screen cave in.  Let me have to smash through shattered glass to see again.

And so over days the crack zig-zagged laboriously across my vision, occasionally emitting an audible snap, like the splintering of the ice which tops a frozen lake.  It was alright to leave it.  I was beginning to like it.

But today as I drove the crack ran, today the crack scared me.  It ran like paper tearing.  It is a tear, a tear in time and space.  A wormhole, a hole for worms.  Or – it’s hard to tell from this side – a black hole.  So now there is the temptation.  To put my hand through in the hope of a hand on the other side grasping mine and pulling me through, pulling me free.  A strong hand pulling me into welcoming arms.

Only I might just as easily disappear.

Belles-lettres

‘ – ’
Yes, it could begin this way, with a sigh,
an expiration and a meeting of mouths.
Outwards from her lips I would pen
her portrait, Flaubert or Apollinaire
flare of nose, soft bloom of cheek.
Her beauty lies at the intersection
between fragile and palpable.
A face whose lines shift to shape
a woman loose and fast and slow,
open but coiled, and never ever still.

She is particular, she is plural.
Her hair falls in calligraphic curls
which frame the story of her face.
Beneath brows cross-hatched in verse
her eyes, ‘a blue million miles’,
both fathomable and fathomless.
How they gaze into mine, and how
at times they stare off, over my shoulder,
out of the window, searching the street for
a solution which never presents itself.

I know the outlines of her life; every time
she lifts a pen, another tale shaded in.
But it’s not merely how she stages
words the way she does, and how
she punctuates tales and pinpoints fancy;
it’s the sudden way they flare, a focus
in the darkness, like struck matches,
just as smiling, her face lights in a flash.
The words are hers, no-one else’s,
hers, and she has gifted a million to me.

I can plot course and detail of her days
to the minute, almost, as she can mine.
She made me wonder had I accepted
age before my time; I found I wanted time
undone. Would I rewind now, leave behind
the swooping highs and curving lows?
No. There is no going back, only forward.
And though a last letter has been penned
still either has yet to be written. The key
being, the story’s never over till it’s over.

Two kinds of faithless

St. David’s bones are mixed up with Justinian’s and Caradog’s.  However much I want to, and even with dragon’s blood in me, sosban fach, I can’t touch the casket and make a wish, for I am two kinds of faithless.

A votive candle is ‘a prayer, a parable, a symbol’, says a notice nearby them.  I can’t light one, for I have no god to whom I pray.  I can’t make of it any kind of parable, because I would be on its receiving end.  And I cannot see it as a symbol because I cannot be seen to set a symbol aflame.

Queen of the savages

My girl is the queen of the savages.

She wears a 1940s leopardskin coat and at her neck, a tiger’s claw.  I was exploring when we met.  I had looked far and wide for her and now that I’ve found her it would be madness to give her up, though of course since she is a queen, it’s hardly my choice.

She is a jungle of possibility, a tangle of dark and black magic and the brilliant light of unexpected clearings and glades and waterfalls and pools.  We have coupled like leopards or tigers in all these places.  I lacerated my back as she rode me on the rough-cut ledge behind the waterfall.  By the pool into which it falls she bade me make her as majestic as possible; for her ankles and wrists I made bracelets of kisses, and around her waist, a belt of them.  I teased and licked her from foothills to peaks and lost myself in her vinery.  Later in a nearby clearing I took back the belt, tied her to a tree at the clearing’s perimeter and tanned her hide till it was as sore as mine was from the waterfall’s ledge.  Even rulers need to be subjected from time to time.

With my help she rigged up a generator for her tribe, who live on the ground beneath and around her kapok tree, defending it as necessary.  By the electric light in our treetop dome we play chess among the night butterflies, thinking as many moves ahead as each other until distracted, one of us capitulates.

At the end of one such long day I laid my head against her queenly breasts and the palm of my hand finds her mound.  I whorled curls of hair with my fingertips and then slipped my hand between the tops of her opened thighs even as we fell asleep.  I was woken at first light by the raucous screech of a maelstrom of hyacinth macaws, but long used to the sound, she slept on.  I started to stroke her with a gentleness unparalleled in her experience; I wanted her to feel as if she was being lightly touched in her dreams, knowing that she had always wanted to know what a young potentate’s wet delerium might feel like.

Each night then we sit on over the chess board, over the pieces she taught me how to carve.  Sometimes there is a stalemate, and we’re not quite sure how to resolve it.  But we’re both chess-playing savages now, and there is always the next game, the endless promise of a new move and an unexpected strategy.

I don’t think I’ll go back to New York.

The book of Saint Albans #2

A trip of dotterel, that’s what this has been
and to court and be courted by you, a pleasure.
But the kettle of hawks are speeding after us now
and their ruthlessness is breathtaking;
no bazaar of guillemot or mutation of thrush
could withstand their decapitating attack.

Oh but the days when we were a parcel of linnet
a flutter of greenfinch, hedgerow-darting;
a giddy knob of pintail singing lustily;
the chestnut patches and bright red bills
of a dodding of shelduck dipping and
a wisp of whispering springtime snipe.

Part-lamentation, part-ballet of swan, necks entwined,
sinuous lovers loving sensuously with a skein
of goosey kisses down belly and spine.  How
I loved to fan my tail for you, ostentatious as a peacock.
Peahen, you charm me like a goldfinch from the trees;
heart of bowerbirds, I will make you mosaic and arch.

One day I know we may sit before a parliament of owl
and law will be applied to us, judgment handed down,
having endured a siege of heron and all the attentions
that a musket of lyrebird could throw at us,
not to mention the beaks and claws of a convocation
of golden eagle, beady, deadly, brooking no excuse.

Then comes our darkest hour. Jackdaws will clatter,
rooks will build at dawn and dusk; and we will be subject
to an unkindness of raven, a murder of crow.  But
like a precipice of choughs on updraughts we will rise
and live to be a spring of teal, fall of woodcock,
murmuration of starling, exaltation of lark.

* * * *

(Collective names for birds sourced with help from the Baltimore Bird Club, British Bird Lovers, Dame Juliana Berners’ The book of Saint Albans, G.W. Lemon’s English Etymology, Rory McGrath’s Bearded tit, and the Palomar Audubon Society.  Plus three of my own devising.)

The book of Saint Albans #1

Tor

This is the West Country.  Sheeting persistent rain.  The hill and meadow and trees are green with it.  Heads bowed under raincoats, a couple are heading up to the top of the Tor from what was once a fenland lake and might very well be again by the time they come down.  They are wet through, puffed out and laughing.  This is not the first time they have been alone together and it won’t be the last; but it is the most significant.  When they gain the part-shelter of the ruined tower they both throw back their hoods, like druids revealing themselves to each other at the most sacred moment of a long-forgotten pagan rite; but despite its solemnity, they smile at each other.  Words have dropped away; they know most if not all of what they need to know about each other.  She knows, for example, that he has recently half-given up, half-lost a girl; he knows that while she lives with someone, theirs is an open relationship.  The two of them have orbited each other for three years in pubs and clubs, and now here, finally, is the moment of truth; the moment when one or other of them might make an advance which takes them into a different realm, a new sphere.  Avalon.

Because of the weather, they have St. Michael’s Tower to themselves.  She is on one side of the doorway, he is on the other.  It’s a narrow entrance and the wind is veering in as they look out.  Raindrops freshen a face that he has always thought a shade weary, for all the brightness of her smile.  Too many long days and late nights and the bad food that goes with those, he guesses.  She may be appraising him in much the same way, setting her attraction against the faults or limitations of his personality.  She shakes her hair a little with a characteristic lean of her head, and gazes off above his shoulder, smiling a half-smile, her mouth a shade open.  Coquettish almost.  He gets that feeling in his gut, of urgent butterflies signalling to the heart and the head that this is the moment.  It would be so easy to kiss her, to sway wetly into her and land his lips on hers.  She’d not stop him; she’d either respond how he thinks he would like, or she’d let him kiss and then gently say, d’you think it’s wise?  But she would let him kiss her.  So why doesn’t he?  The air is damp and tingling and the moment seems to last forever, certainly long enough for him to wonder if she will take the initiative and sway wetly over to his mouth.  But she doesn’t and he doesn’t.  To try to reset time he stares up at the square view of cloud the roofless tower affords them, but when he looks back and into her eyes, still something stays that step forward, that drop of his shoulders.  Is it that he is not sure of the future he might have with her?  It troubles him both in itself and as the lily-livered reason for his not leaning across, for not allowing himself to tumble into something because it would not quite be perfect, judged against a standard he has no right to impose.

They stay like that for the longest time, suspended in a place which suspends time for those who seek to stop clocks.  Why doesn’t he bite the apple that’s in his grasp?  Do it!  Do it now!  He doesn’t do it.  Neither does she.  When they head out of the doorway and into the rain and down the hill, the sense of cowardice and disappointment is crushing.

If he had his time over, he would lean across the two feet separating the pair of them and kiss her soft and long, and hang the consequences.  For now he knows that very few of us are quite what we seem to be on the surface.  The perfect are less than perfect, and those who are willing to put themselves in a place of magic, regardless of their imperfections, they often have so much more to offer, so much more to give.  And now he knows that he will never know what he would have discovered about her, about himself, about life, if he had leant across an open doorway and tried to turn a friend into a lover.

Mending Pinocchio, breaking hearts

While she was away he set about mending Pinocchio but in doing so he splintered the red plastic of her heart-shaped pack of sewing needles.  He tried piecing the fragments back together with the superglue he was using to fix the puppet but the cracks were still visible.  He asked himself why anyone would design needles to be kept in a fragile plastic heart shape that was so difficult to open it risked being broken every time you needed one.  There was no good answer.

The very moment she arrived home, just before he came alongside the car and opened its door for her, she discovered that she had lost the heart from the necklace she had been given when she was seven years old.  He never knew until that moment of loss that she had been its keeper for so long; or if he had asked or been told, he had forgotten.  His own heart did not leap to see her.  Hers was distracted by the loss of its symbol.  There was no good answer to any of these things.

Knowingly and unknowingly, the heart inside each of them was being slowly broken.

All

I give her my all but my all will never be enough, it can never situate itself as enough.  We set ourselves up for perpetual heartbreak.  It’s not as if she didn’t warn me that it would be this way, she did, and not just once, but over and over.  It was crazy to begin, crazy to carry on, and now it’s crazy to stop and crazy to carry on.  But you cannot take the love away from us.  There is no operation that can be performed to extract it.  The love goes on, oblivious to and undaunted by the situation.  Our hearts are breaking even as they affirm that the other is kept safe there.  We keep on imagining what we cannot have.  I will, she will.  What we imagine is a vision which covers all of life.  You can call it a fantasy if you like, but I never will.  It counters the heartbreak, seals each crack as it opens, makes the heart whole.  Between us we have written this parallel world into reality.  We will always be able to slip inside it together, but independently too.  We won’t stop longing for what we cannot have.  We will love each other in secret till my marbles scatter or the pump in her heart fails.  And even then something of us will go on existing afterwards.  For somewhere there is a record of our words, and some day some or all of it may be uncovered.  Just a small scrap of text – a scrap of us – will be enough for a researcher of the heart to re-imagine it all.  A world from a grain of sand, the magnificent vision of a world that we deliberately condensed to a grain of sand, to keep it hidden.

Awe

We invent and extend each other.  We give ourselves greater reach than any human has; additional limbs, an extra sex, flexibility beyond that possessed by the lithest dancer or the most limber gymnast.  Our fingers are feather-tipped and we have Aphrodite’s lips.  We don’t need her body or Heracles’, but we are as strong as apes and call upon more stamina than a marathon runner running marathons daily.  Our minds are made up.  We invent the next line of the story as the story is happening.  Fable becomes fantasy, fantasy becomes tale, neither tall nor short.  We make each other breathless.  We are awed at what we become, have become, are.  What we will be.  We are chameleons, constantly changing, adapting, accepting.  We fix and swap, and swap and fix again.  From each moment blooms another ten, and from those, ten more.  We take mythology and make of it our own legend.  We dive lower than a Nereid and fly higher than Hermes.  We speak with the voices of gods, and we are awed by each other.  There is a catch in our breath, an answering gasp.  There is a catch in our vocal chords too.  We chastise and deify each other.  Our minds are made up.  And yet it is all happening right now, right before our eyes.  We are the first and the last, the past, the present, and the future.

The last question

The last question he found hardest to answer.  What did he know of the stars, really?  A few of the constellations, wonder taken in seeing pinpricks of light fill the blue-black of country sky with radiance; pleasure in the heavenly bodies being different down under from up over, even though he’d never seen them from there.  Had in fact turned down the chance to.

His mind tossed it back and forth, a crumpled ball of paper on which scribblings had been crossed out and finally discarded, constantly moving from one hand to the other.  When it came down to it, he was a sceptic and a rationalist, rather than a believer in something that lies beyond our grasp or a humble seeker of enlightenment. But he had read books and listened to music which strove to transcend material existence.  He had studied theories of reincarnation and the nature of the cosmos, had in fact encountered all manner of mystical influences, any number of individuals yearning to break free of the day to day, just as he had regularly yearned to, and yet still he refused the notion of a soul, except in a creative and emotional sense.  But when the crumpled ball of paper hit the palm of his other hand, it told him that despite reasoning that there was nothing independent of a physically resourced mind, he could nevertheless feel something rising in the convolutions of his brain, twisting and turning, seeking escape or an entity other than itself.  Wanting to take his heart along with it.  What was latent and hidden would insist on trying to push its way to the surface, like the vapours that intoxicated the sibyl at the Delphic oracle.

But he didn’t want to receive transmissions from the gods or become one with everything.  He just wanted to become one with her.  And when they loved each other, when their bodies and mouths and foreheads were pressed together and their eyes were locked tight, then they spoke in tongues and what they saw and felt was as infinite and as transcendent as he could ever imagine needing or wanting to be.

And when reminded that so far he had evaded giving a straight answer to the last question, it was this urge that led him to say yes – oh yes, we would see stars in daylight if the veils dropped from our eyes, if we scrolled up the blinds covering them.  But, he went on to say, the chances are that at the very moment we saw those starry stars, our retinas would burn, and from then on, memory of what we saw in that millisecond of visionary blindness would churn all the subsequent workings of our imaginations, of our minds.  Nothing would ever be the same again.

So, he said, if you’re ready, hold my hand, step into that light with me.  Let’s see where we go.

Strange she is, and secret

As she took the mushrooms out of the shopping basket and set them on the worktop, the bag split.  The buttons rolled everywhere, turning the surface into a field of every which way toadstools, their caps so fresh and white that she knew them to be not quite natural, obviously grown for grocers rather than among the leaf litter of a woodland floor.  She put her bare arms around them and pulled them all together, creating a small mountain of mushrooms, feeling their dry dampness against her skin.

She fried onions and garlic in butter, added the chopped mushrooms and some dried porcini, stirred in flour, then stock, milk and a little sherry.  She let the soup simmer in the tureen.  She remembered as always her own mother’s attempt to make mushroom soup, her horrified reaction when served a bowl of soup the colour – and taste – of school tights.  She had refused to eat any more than the first mouthful, and her mother too had given up on it after only a further spoonful or two, the glimmer of a smile displacing her disappointed anger.  Eventually with toast inside them they had laughed and laughed about it, and the soup had passed into family legend.  Her own mushroom soup was a different kettle of ceps entirely.  At the last she added nutmeg and a dash of pepper.  And to each bowl she served herself, she would pour in a spiral of single cream.

The soup would last her several days.  After she had eaten the first of it, she got out the darning mushroom and mended the socks he had given her on Thursday for stipulated return on Monday morning.  She liked to darn, to make do and mend, and that he entrusted his socks to her, that she knew he would inspect every detail of her stitching, gave the needlework an undercurrent that even a sharp-eyed observer of this domestic scene would miss.

When she was done with the socks, she covered herself with the woollen throw, itself frequently darned.  The colours she chose rarely matched the blanket’s, but she liked it so, as if her repairs were fungal spores blooming in among fresher but less virulent planting.  She reached out and took down her copy of Meredith from the shelf above the armchair, and thought about the leather-bound copy of the same which she had left in his suitably Victorian wooden in-tray for him to find first thing that Friday morning.  She had inscribed the flyleaf, drawing his attention to the line ‘she was made to bruise and bless’, but she had known he would not be quick to react.  He would have spent the day considering his next move, just as carefully as she planned hers, knowing each action was freighted with significance, heavy with consequence.  For her the poems were a type of love calling across a century or so to theirs; and she was confident that he would see it that way too.

She longed for Monday morning to come around.  Until then she would eat mushroom soup, re-read ‘Love in the valley’ and anticipate what he might have in store for her when she arrived before his desk at nine o’clock sharp.

The gift of all travel #4: Mythos

The island was far from the largest in the Aegean, but neither was it the smallest.  Armed with impeccable references from house-sitting and artfully inflated experience of kitchen work and waiting respectively, they got a job running the café by the communal pool belonging to a complex of villas.

That summer they worked hard, living in the most basic of white-painted two-roomed houses.  From the bedroom window they had only a craned-neck glimpse of the sea; but all they had to do was go out and climb to the top of the narrow lane to see the bay spread out before them in all its deep blue glory.  They lived cheaply and were saving money.  In the off-season, they would be able to travel.  To travel lightly, that is.  As if leaving no impression behind, but storing up between them a treasure-trove of memories.  Ones which in their immediacy were able to keep at bay the sundered chests of family silver and jewellery that each respectively carried within them.  They would hop from island to island, from coast to coast, leaving only footprints and the outlines of their bodies in the sands of deserted beaches.

She was front of house, of course, and he worked the kitchen, though once or twice a week they swapped over, for the variety, to keep themselves on their toes, to be sure of the other’s ropes.  They had inherited the menu, but over the course of the summer began developing it.  She was quick to gauge where the tastes of their customers were not being met.  And as long as there was praise and little or no complaint, the company rep left them to it.

In the kitchen he took to wearing shirts that were either exotic, loud, or Hawaiian, and often all three.  He said he wore them to keep rather than look cool.  It was hot behind the stove, hotter still grilling up the Wednesday evening barbeque.  Then more than ever he needed their airiness.  She wore shorts to her knee and pure white shirts with sleeves rolled to just beneath the elbows because those made her seem less pale.  Between orders she mused on the families arrayed on the loungers around the pool, a not especially broad cross-section of British society.  On how each couple interacted with their kids; the ones who got it wrong and the ones who didn’t.  She remembered her own mistakes, sprinkled among the larger sense of unconditional love and achievement in having given her children the means to find their own way.  Her throat thickened and blood coursed when she dwelt on them.  But the mood passed with the work and before long she would be smiling at the boys and girls splashing about in front of her eyes.  Usually they were young enough to retain their overarching innocence; it was surprising how even the older ones resisted becoming encrusted with the attitudes of their parents, though often they had the better parts of their characters.  Some were self-satisfied, thought themselves better than the couple who waited on them; others were inscrutable, often to the point of arrogance.  But as many were plain and simple and straight and you could discern that some at least of their success in life lay behind that.  Others still melted with relief on encountering her warmth, and immediately opened up to her.  In doing so they exposed nearly as many foibles as the smug and unreadable ones, but they had hearts and usually minds and over the course of a week she would grow fond of them.  Set back a little in the kitchen, he saw and heard most of this, and at night they talked about the people they served, compared attitudes with their own, the ones which had brought them here, had led them to want to escape.  He almost wanted to say, escape their fates.

But it was hard, being amenable and compliant all day, all week, all summer long.  And it was hard, not seeing her own children before her.  Sometimes at night she took it out on him.  He soaked it up, like a sponge, and wrung it away, without letting the black or yellow bile infect him, without becoming bilious himself.  And after raving and crying and sticking pins into herself and him, she would come into his arms and feel his warmth and his stillness and then nothing mattered, everything was fine, and she knew she was where she wanted to be.

It was usually on the Wednesday night, under the cover of darkness and filled with Mythos that the odd man would sidle up to the counter to try his luck.  Some expressed surprise that they were a couple; evidently they had not subjected the dynamic of the kitchen to close scrutiny.  Nevertheless among these odd men there were those to whom she found herself drawn; found herself wanting.  She and her travelling partner, her head chef, had often talked about this.  And they established a rule, though perhaps it wasn’t a hard and fast one.  If someone wanted to play, they would have to play with them both.  That weeded those odd men still further, but three times that summer an arrangement was made, and once it was stuck to.  They doubted the man in question would be bringing his family back to the same villa next year; though perhaps he might, because the sex was free and unbridled.  And for his hosts, it was a joy to them both because it made fantasy real and threatened nothing.

At summer’s end, on a cooler morning before dawn, they set off on to walk up the island’s highest mountain.  At the top they would find an orthodox church.  They knew the church would be shut, for it opened only on one day a year, but that gave their climb added curiosity.  They would not encounter a soul, at that time of day, this time of year.

The climb was hard and they stopped frequently among the olives and thyme to drink water.  At the top of the mountain, having circumnavigated the white-painted church, having attempted to peer in at its windows, having looked down into the depths of the sea and out to distant peaks on other islands, they lay in the shade to one side of the holy building and consummated their feeling for the island on which they now lived and for the life they had made there.

Silence

The week began with what might have been a death and ended with a funeral.

I slid in the CD and ‘Silence’ started up.  A loud, harrying song.  Coming round a bend early in the drive I hit a cat.  It darted out into the road from among trees.  Nothing I could do, short of not driving a car.  As I braked I clipped it around about my right-hand front wheel. The noise wasn’t loud.  A padded thud.  Yet when I looked in my mirror, expecting the cat to be lying there in the road, I couldn’t see anything at all.  I stopped and got out and checked on either side of the road; still nothing.  The cat was gone.  It must have had one life left.  A mostly white cat with a black crown.  I got back in the car and tried to breath normally.

The harbour when I got to it was like a mirror, perfectly reflecting the matt drabness of the boats and the thick grey of the sky. The stillness was absolute; the silence too. Hermetically sealed in my car, the engine noise filtered out by my wandering mind, troubled and in need of its cure, I was driving through a noiseless void.  A dead world.

Something always dies when we fall.  But we have to remind ourselves that out of sight of death, a thousand things are being born at that very moment; and that until the very last, the births will always outweigh the deaths.

As I drove away, at the end of the week, after the funeral, the sky was full of cumulus, like Monet’s Le bassin d’Argenteuil, stretching away against the blue, and the blue of the sky coloured the curving channel of water threading its way through the glistening brown mud flats, and the curving channel of water was jewelled with brightly painted boats and the promise of happier moments.

Bad company

He wanted to answer, but first he had to warn her that the answers were much, much longer than the questions.  And did she mind if he started with the third question first?

He wanted to say that he wanted to be there, at the top of the tower with her, presumptuous enough to take her cheeks in his palms to keep her eyes locked to his; or if down the deepest well, then he would whisper, as she might to her horse, so close in her ear that in the darkness it was as if he were inside her mind.  For two years now he had only felt alone when she was not there; for twenty four months his isolation had been relative.  But before then, oh yes, for long, long stretches of his life, he had felt sickeningly, absolutely alone; an isolation – it was so for him too – that was often strangely comforting because there was nowhere else to go.  An isolation that at times he had deliberately chosen, like a reclusive monk.

First as a boy, separated from his family, anxious, unable to talk to anyone about what made him feel so alone.  Then as an adolescent, imprisoned in a body that wanted so much more than it offered.  As a young man, his solitariness reached its solipsistic height even as he was continually surrounded by millions of people.  Defeated, depressed, empty, certain of nothing, looking down on antlike life and toy trains from the 17th floor of – yes – a tower, listening to the sound of nothing but currents of wind howling unceasingly up the sides of the building, as if it were poison gas seeking an inlet.  Night and day he paced and trawled the streets in search of he knew not what.

Later, as one half of two, but still living so much in his own head that often it was hard to leave its confines, wherever he was.  Alone with one other, who was also alone with him, and alone in the many crowds of which he routinely formed a part.  Always seeking eyes, then hiding or running from them.  He could only conclude that he feared what he craved.  An end to aloneness, apartness.

Perhaps only in the early years of fatherhood, when life was so busy and full, an unbroken night’s sleep a rarity, only then did it seem that isolation faded.  But slowly the otherness crept back.  Prompted by a crisis, he sought someone who among other things knew its poisoned apple sweetness too.  And when he found her he could not believe his luck; his qualified luck, as he learnt that the sense of isolation which found her out in empty rooms and ones filled with life, might at times be inescapable even in the arms of a man she loved and who loved her.  But he would not compete with it.  He would respect it, let her go to it, wait for her to come back from it.  Perhaps together they might find the balance that escaped them apart.  He wanted their isolation knit together, to make of it something weirdly companionable, something understood on both sides.  When she needed to, they could spend the day in silence.  And at the end of such a day, they might talk only in whispers, and communicate as much by touch and expression as words.  He knew the ways to bring her close.  How to burn away any last vestiges of detachment.

Xerophytic

I survive on scraps.  One keeps me going till the next.  The sun bakes the earth until it is brittle to the touch, like clinker after a coal fire has burnt down, far to the north.  And yet I am surrounded by blue, the bleached blue of the sky, the stronger colouring of the sea.  It is a body of water I am unable to touch.  I long for it, to be submerged within it, to become one with it.  But I cannot reach it, for I am fixed, rooted.

Egyptian grasshoppers stridulate unceasingly in the olives, as if should they go silent they might cede dominion of the trees, the island, the earth.  Only in the evening when the temperature drops sufficiently does the scraping of leg against wing case cease.  Then, in its place, the softer, more melodious buzzing of the cicadas.  As the orange full moon rises, I breath in the meltemi, and arms reaching out, fingers extended, pluck another scrap from the air.

I am a cypress who wishes he was the swift momentarily touching down in me.  A gnarled olive who longs for winter to come so that my berries might be picked and pressed or packed and – either way – find their way into one of her bowls.  An Aleppo pine whose resin might flavour the drink she puts to her lips and takes into her body.  In darker moments, I am the oleander willing the lover to lose herself in me.  On lighter, fresher days, I am wild mountain thyme sending out my scented message on the wind to particular fingers: rub my leaves, put them to your nose.  Take me deep into your lungs.

Quarters of the whole

She was particular; and yet she was so many things.  Her hair fell in calligraphic curls.  They framed the story of her face.

She worried that what he saw was a fantasy version of herself.  Not the nail-biting, insecure woman with an array of flaws and irritations and daily concerns.  But he had an answer for that.  He said he’d seen enough of the flesh and blood to know how fantasy and reality were connected; that he loved them both.  And besides, couldn’t he turn it around and say, then he wasn’t the man she thought he was?  But he knew she’d seen enough of him to be confident that she was not losing herself merely in a mirage.  Their imaginations might transfigure their day-to-day characters, enable them each night to rise free of bones and guts, but every day they returned to and reported on their separate navigations through life.

He said that he could see the whole of her entering into whichever aspect of her was foremost at any one time; that behind the archivist was the teller of tales, and next to her the lover, and besides her, the friend and mother; and so on.  You could put any quarter first, but the others fractions were there behind, each a party to the draw, strengthening it, simultaneously solidifying and lightening it.  She was warm against his chest and fluttered freely inside it.

She smiled at that, said he was lovely, and admitted defeat, for now.

He let out a sigh.  He wanted the fantasy and he wanted the reality.  He wanted it all.  Because it was all of a part.