Read part (i)

She was painting a picture of him, she had told him earlier across a table. Art feeding art. Life feeding art, criss-crossing across the way. Her breath had been warm, beer-tainted, warm. Two mornings later he changed the sheets on his bed, an hour after rising. They were still warm. Would he have been able to tell the difference between the warmth of two bodies having slept in that bed and just one? In a way, in mind only, there had been another person in that bed, a phantom of imagination. The bed was warm when he woke; comfortable; phallus erectus. He had not arisen immediately, but there had been no sleight of hand and no spring of warm, wet, pleasure-sensation, just a dull longing.

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He felt it roll over him in a wave; the realisation that a story was coming. It was like standing on a beach, staring at a huge, overbearing tidal wave as it builds up higher and higher in slow motion, white horses straining against blue reigns at its crest. He had had dreams like that as a child. He had feared then that the wave would sweep everything away, or sweep him away, and drown him or leave him alone. Now he welcomed the wave, the metaphor, the coming story.

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