For me, The Rainbow is the right story right now. It’s beautiful and it’s honest, with less of the literary self-awareness of other novels of the time I like, such as those of Joyce or Woolf. Admittedly, I’m only about two-thirds of the way through, but unless it has a really bad final third, it’s shaping up to be one of my favourite books in a long while. Which surprises me, actually, because I didn’t previously rate D. H. Lawrence that highly, even if he is probably the most famous writer to have come from my home city.

I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover a few years ago, and I admired him for the frankness with which he described physical love-making (you’ll probably notice his influence in some of my more explicit work), but I found his writing style to often be quite blunt, almost crude, a little thrown-together. He has a tendency to repeat himself quite a lot as well, like he might use a word or a phrase and then you’ll see that word or phrase again half a page later, as if he can’t quite let go of it and wants to make sure you’ve noticed how good it is. He does that in The Rainbow too, sometimes to greater effect, sometimes to lesser.

He was a talented writer though, not as ambitious as my other early twentieth-century literary heroes perhaps, but talented nonetheless. The Rainbow, I feel, has both the broad strokes and the subtlety of a Turner painting, and when he starts describing the weather, and the way the characters experience it, like the sky pregnant with rain about to break as Tom Brangwen goes to visit Lydia Lensky to ask her to marry him, it is of a Turner painting that I am given a distinct impression.

I think, however, that if I had read it at another time, while I was at university perhaps, I would not have been so captivated by it. I would probably have read the first hundred-and-fifty or so pages, and then become bored with its apparent repetition as it moves down the successive generations of the Brangwen family and how each falls in love and marries. But I can appreciate it more now, now that, for the first time, I am living with my girlfriend, and living through the new and unfamiliar joys and challenges that brings, because, while in some ways The Rainbow is a love story, it is much more than that.

It’s not just a fall-in-love-and-live-happily-ever-after story, it’s about the way love grows up and brings a new awareness of oneself, how it makes your blood run hotter and brings you to a new life, how you relate to another person and how you mature with them as you live together and begin to know one another. It’s about how love and your regard for another person can be constantly shifting and altering, moving through subtle shades, and sometimes contradictory. Lawrence’s character, at least when they are young, are not living a static, easy life of marital bliss, they are constantly trying to understand each other, to re-evaluate themselves, struggling with their passions and their angers and their desires.

The effect of the characters’ experiences is all the greater because the reader watches the characters grown and mature, Tom from a young country farmer to an old land owner in the first generation, and Anna from a little girl to a mother of five in the second generation. I liked the way Tom was shaken by his first drunken sexual experience with a Nottingham prostitute, and the way it sobered and matured him, made him wiser and less happy-go-lucky, so that he was nervous and awkward when he first encountered the young widow Lydia Lensky. I liked the way, when they were first married, he would run away to the pub because he was almost frightened of how he could not understand his wife and her past life in Poland, though he loved her and they made love, and then how they gradually come to understand one another and their connection becomes deep and unbreakable.

I liked too how, when Will and Anna are first married and moved in together, though they passionately love each other, they also hurt each other without meaning to. How she would become so absorbed in sewing or some other work that she would forget to make the dinner for when Will returned, and then he would become angry, and then she would become angry and want to hurt him, and they would argue and then they would come together and be passionate again. I’m putting it bluntly, but Mr. Lawrence does it much more subtly. It seems honest and realistic the way he captures the shifting moods within a relationship, the way two people have to adjust to each other and can affect each other.

I actually found it disappointing, almost upsetting, to read when Will tried to cheat on Anna with a girl he sat next to at the theatre, because I empathised with the characters and wanted them to succeed. What actually happens though is that the girl rejects his advances and Will goes home to Anna and she asks him about where he’s been and he says he went to the theatre on his own and met nobody, and she can tell that he is keeping something from her, but then she decides that she doesn’t care, and when he realises that she is indifferent, it reignites his passion for her, and their marriage becomes stronger and more secure after that, even though it had started to sour.

And the book is not just about the love between men and women, but also parental love. It’s touching the way the love grows between Tom Brangwen and his wife’s daughter, the young Anna. At first Anna rejects him because he is not her real father, but he is patient with her, and they grow to love each other, and Tom almost takes solace in his love for Anna when he feels unable to connect with his wife. Then, much later on, Anna and Tom have a disagreement, and Anna accuses him of not being her real father, but immediately regrets it because she loves him and because it makes her feel less secure in the world and it feels like she has broken something between them.

The Rainbow is a love story then, but it’s about the changing shades of love as one grows older, as a person moves from a child, to a lover, to a parent. It’s about the people relate to the people around them, and how this can be both difficult and life-affirming. The thing is, all lovers argue sometimes, and all lovers, in their everyday lives, sometimes hurt or frustrate each other, people are as inconstant as the weather, sometimes we can happy or sad or lonely or irritable, sometimes several of these at once, and that can make living with someone you love difficult. But you stay together, and grow together.

I’m not complaining, and I’m not trying to make The Rainbow sound in anyway negative, because it’s a very positive novel, at least so far. Obviously, I’ll have to wait to see how it ends before I can say what my ultimate lasting impression of it will be. I’m very happy living with my girlfriend, of course, but it’s a new experience, a different way of living to when you’re living with friends or your family. Sometimes you can argue without really knowing why, or one of you could be sad for some reason completely unrelated to the other person, and that can directly affect the other person. You can both have your doubts and hopes and fears and joys, and they all get mixed in together. I don’t think this is abnormal nor necessarily bad, it’s just part of being in a relationship and living together, but The Rainbow acknowledges this in ways I haven’t really seen before, perhaps, to an extent, in To the Lighthouse and Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time, but not in a way that speaks to me like this work by a writer from my home city. Right story, right time.

I sighed. It had been a long day, made longer now by the incessant traffic. I was forced to stop once again behind two red lights and a cloud of grey smoke. Another car was in front of this one, and another, and another.

I put my left elbow on the edge of my car door, uncomfortably pressed against the window, then rested my cheek on my knuckle, feeling the bones of my fingers press against my jaw. With my other hand I twisted the dial on the radio. A pop song played almost indistinguishably behind a wall of static. I tried twisting the tuning dial, but all I got was static, sometimes with a song phasing in, sometimes with nothing but the electric crackle.

I turned it off, having been up and down the entire FM spectrum without my car budging an inch. It was no good, I’d have to replace the aerial that was snapped off my car soon, or remember to put some tapes worth listening to in my car or maybe even fork out for a car CD player, though that would probably get nicked anyway.

The brake lights of the car in front went off momentarily, creating a little glimmer of hope that I may be able to start moving again. It was false hope though; they came on a second later and the car in front stopped, without even giving me chance to get in gear.

I sighed again and let my hands fall to my knees. As I did this, some far off lights had changed colour, and the chain of cars in front of me had begun to move. I was slow to notice this and took a few seconds to get in gear and start moving. I could feel the impatience of the drivers behind me because it was a reflection of my own feelings.

Not that I really had anything to get home for, I mused as I crept along at twenty miles an hour; just the evening’s TV probably, maybe a movie. At one time on a Friday night I would have been raring to go out to a club with my mates, maybe meet someone and bring her back to mine for ‘coffee’ at 2 am. When did I stop feeling like that?

I suppose this is how it always happens; as a slow, gradual process that sneaks up on you and takes hold before you even notice it. Most of my friends are like this too, although most of them ended up settling down with someone, buying a house, even having kids, while I still lived in my bachelor pad.

I was nearing the lights when they turned to amber, forcing me to stop again. At least the car in front that had been spewing out the grey exhaust fumes had gone. I put my car into neutral and looked out the windows.

Through the windscreen all I could see was blinding autumn sun, low in the sky and right in my field of vision, even with the visor down. Needless to say, I didn’t spend too long looking directly at our nearest star.

To my right were cars all passing by me at a uniform speed, as if they were connected like carriages on a train. A lot of them were four wheel drives or people carriers, with pale kids staring out of the back windows and bags of shopping piled up in the large boot behind them. These dwarfed the smaller cars, the hatchbacks like my Ford, which were driven by just the ordinary people, generally sans passengers. Then, every so often in the train of cars, there came a luxury car, such as a BMW or a Mercedes, driven by professionals in suits and ties with a Bluetooth headset sticking out their ear like some pretentious tumour of superiority.

I looked to my other side when the people on my right started to annoy me, mostly just by the fact that they were in motion while I was stationary. The entrance to a school was on my left side and children of various ages were pouring out of it in green blazers, which were sometimes covered by coats.

One girl, talking and laughing with a group, caught my attention. She was, I would guess, between fourteen and sixteen and quite pretty. Her hair was dark, and so were her eyes because of the eyeliner she was wearing. Apparently she reckoned herself to be a woman, though she was scarcely past girlhood, as shown by the developing breasts held in place by a black bra that was just visible through the thin material of her white cotton blouse.

I realised that I was staring and felt slightly ashamed, though I hadn’t been consciously thinking anything to be ashamed of. I looked at her face again; she looked like the sort of girl I would have been attracted to had I still been that age. That thought made me smile, though it was a sad smile. It wasn’t so many years ago that I was that age, though the years do seem shorter now. Back then, my life stretched out before me like a vast ocean.

I remembered how I felt back then, all those hormones racing through my body whenever I saw a girl like that. That excited rush of chemicals in my body whenever I was around a member of the opposite sex had generally worked to my advantage in my younger days, giving me a desire for each particular girl that my confidence would have been ashamed to fail.

I always found this hormone-fuelled confidence to be my best feature, causing more than my fair share of girls to fall for me despite my habitual acne and uncontrollable hair at that time. I was even luckier at my university when my acne had disappeared and I was able to find a style that used my messy hair to its fullest advantage, while still maintaining the confidence and experience I had with girls at secondary school.

In time, however, my raging sea of hormones became more like a placid lake, and I got less of a thrill being with girls. I became more indifferent to the female species around my mid-twenties and, while I still hankered after the sex, I got bored of relationships and became unable to hold one down for more than a couple of months. As a result, my confidence with women has been reduced and I find it more difficult to talk to them.

My sex drive too seems to have waned even further from the desires of my twenties and thirties to just the occasional masturbatory session as a means of satisfaction. What I do want now, however, is a fulfilling and meaningful relationship.

I realised that I had been staring at the empty patch of tarmac where the girl had passed my sight line, for the last minute. I refocused my eyes through my glasses and then, almost instinctively, looked for her again. She hadn’t gone far and I now saw her breaking away from her group of friends and walking towards a boy maybe two years older and wearing casual clothes; jeans and a hooded top. In his ear I could see a thick black plug and on his chin there grew a fuzzy teenage stubble.

He and the girl exchanged a smile, a brief embrace and then a kiss. I turned away to see the traffic lights turn to amber, a misplaced sensation of jealously clinging at my chest as I got into gear and pulled away at green.

As I drove off I cast one final look at the young pair their lips still locked together and the boy’s hand placed firmly on her buttock underneath her low-hanging black bag. I wished I was that age again; the youthful mind doesn’t understand the cloying fear of loneliness that accompanies old age.

I’m not sure if this is the same for all writers, but I have to really feel what I write. I suppose it probably is the same for all the best writing, otherwise fiction is just churned out soullessly. That’s kind of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s well-written, no doubt, but I didn’t really get any feeling from it, like he didn’t feel anything when he wrote it. If I don’t feel anything when I write, my writing becomes lifeless, and lately I haven’t been feeling anything.

You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.

I shall elaborate: I wrote a short novel before (still in it’s first draft, still, one day, to be put up on this site) and the way I did that was by making myself write two pages a day, six out of seven days, until the first draft was finished. This is one way to get writing done and becomes easier with practice but, particularly with early attempts, the writing can seem forced, and consequently, there’s a lot in the ‘novel’ I’m not very happy with. I’ll go back to it sometime, but in the meantime I’ve been working on this other piece, extracts from which I plan to submit for my course, though I’m still waiting for feedback on my first submission.

The problem I think I’m having now is firstly that I don’t want to force myself to write it, I want to feel it and then write what I feel. Therefore, rather than set myself a daily quota to meet, or a total word-count to aim for, as I did with my previous piece, which I set, rather modestly, at fifty-thousand words, I have been writing when I felt like it, with the idea that it will be finished when it’s finished whether it takes fifteen-thousand words or a hundred-and-fifty-thousand.

But why is feeling it so necessary, so much more necessary than with my previous work? Well that ties up with the second problem I think I’m having: this work is pretty ambitious, I’m tempted to go as far as ‘experimental’, but that would be only in terms of my own work, and not within the western literary canon. As one might expect, it’s a very modernist-influenced work, even somewhat impressionistic (the above picture, by Leonid Afremov, I’m quite sure, is a type of impressionism, and has been something of an influence among other things). It has been particularly influenced by Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which is a dangerously great work to emulate.

Proust has a distinct writing style, centred around extremely long, digressive sentences. His syntax is what I wanted to emulate, but in doing that, it is easy to appropriate the kind of late-nineteenth / early twentieth-century phrases he uses, which then makes the work something of a pastiche. This became such a problem in early passages that I had to stop reading Proust altogether. Now I feel rather stylistically lost: I’m not sure how to write the work, except that it’s a kind of stream-of-consciousness. I think this is my biggest problem at the moment, along with the perennial problem of the amateur novelist: maintaining a consistent style across the whole work.

Another problem I’m having, which is related to style, is discourse, the layout of the piece, how it is introduced, how the narrator moves between events. As I said before, it is impressionistic: it aims to give impressions rather than definitive explanations. I suppose I should say here, as I have not yet done, what the piece is about.

Its working title is Lila, Remi and, as the name suggested, it is about two girls, specifically two girls with whom the narrator has a relationship. It’s not a love-story, or a romance novel, but rather a story about relationships, as my works tend to be. There is never any question of “will they / won’t they” get together, because this is made explicit from early on, and there is no happily-ever-after because the story deals with the relationships in their entirety, from the first moment the narrator meets each of them until after he breaks up with them. From a suspense point-of-view you might suggest I’ve already shot myself in the foot by revealing the entire story from the word go, but the piece is about how and why things happen, not what happens. But yes, that sort of story is more uncommon and more difficult to write, which is what I meant by both experimental and ambitious.

This relates back to an idea of mine that I like stories that are not spoiled by knowing the ending, of which Ulysses is my favourite example. Now, if you know the ending of most thrillers, or, in fact, most genre fiction, the story is ruined, there is no point in reading it, because you know what’s coming. If you know that Ulysses ends with a reconciliation between husband and wife, mutual forgiveness and acceptance, the story is not ruined. If you know every detail of Leopold Bloom’s journey over the day described in Ulysses, the story is not ruined, rather, I believe, enjoyment of the novel is increased, it makes more sense and can be more easily appreciated. For me, Ulysses is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are a lot of ideas and events in it which do not make sense on first reading and only in the context of later ideas and events. In a way the entire book makes very little sense until the last page is finished, and then it is as if all the pieces of the puzzle come together at once to form an intricate tapestry.

I am not aiming for exactly this, but perhaps something along those lines. My story is not told chronologically, but rather, like Remembrance of Things Past, in the order that the narrator remembers things and how they link together. This poses the problem of how to put all the events together so that a coherent narrative is produced, and I’m still working on that, but, for example, though this is subject to change, currently, there is a part where the narrator first finds out Lila’s name. He recalls that the name made him think of lilacs, which then leads to a digression about how he once decided, after they were going out, to buy her some lilacs, or rather, some other flowers, because he could not find lilacs anywhere, and how she was overly-happy to receive them. In the story this is a sudden narrative jump from the first time he meets her to a time when he has already been going out with her for several weeks. The plot then moves back again, but has created an impression of the semi-random leaps human consciousness makes.

Again, this is why it is so important that I feel this story in order to write it. I have to get the relationships straight in my head so that, as I write, I can freely jump between different times in them to give an impression of what it was like living them. In a way, I have to imagine as if I had had these relationships, as if I had known these girls.

In order to ease this process, and somewhat in homage to Remembrance of Things Past, I have made the story semi-autobiographical. In many ways, the nameless narrator is me, or a version of me with a few exaggerations and tweaks. It’s as if I’m writing an alternate universe account of my meeting these two fictional girls and going out with them. Perhaps this could be interpreted as some Freudian wish-fulfilment, perhaps it is only a logical path to writing this sort of novel. All characters come from the author’s psyche however, and so are always, in greater or lesser parts, a rendering of the author or aspects of the author. It has been said to me before that the male characters in my stories are always essentially me, but I felt this was only half the truth; the female characters are just as much myself as well. There’s a further discussion of the importance of androgyny in my work in my About section, but the female characters generally just express different aspects of my personality to the male ones, as much as being composites of people I know.

My third and final problem at the moment, if it can be called that, in terms of this story, is that I seem to be in a pretty good relationship right now. At the least it seems hypocritical to write about how depressing and bad relationships are, or can be, when I’m enjoying one so much. And at the most, it’s possible my overall view of them is even changing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty pessimistic and fatalistic about these things, but right now I remain content, and my work is built on discontent.

Of course, this might not be the problem at all. I don’t seem to have had much time or inclination to write fiction lately, and so I could just be going through a non-writing spell (I refuse to use the term ‘writer’s block’ because it’s dicky and self-important, which I most certainly am not), but I can’t help returning to the idea that happiness is antithetical to my writing. We shall see.

I don’t think I’ve read or watched anything of great inspiration lately either, not something that’s made me want to go off and write or even write about it. The last really great movie I watched was Let the Right One In, which I highly recommend, but otherwise I seem to have just been watching b-movies and comedies and such, oh, and I watched Forbidden Planet finally, but I was tired and half-asleep by its end, and somehow it wasn’t quite all I’d hoped for: I rather prefer the implausability and exaggeration of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars.

As for reading, I just a few minutes ago finished Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s a very short novella, and it has the typical Capote flair in the writing, but there’s something about his writing style that’s kind of boring. It’s hard to explain, but stuff that is consistently good can be boring, and with Capote there’s none of the wordplay or sudden flights of fancy in Joyce or Woolf. It’s like with those latter writers they really feel what they’re writing, but Capote seems more like he just developed this rather masterful manner of expression and from that base is able to just churn out stories. The plot also seemed a little ridiculous, with a sixty year-old woman running away from her sister’s house to stay in a tree-house for several days with her sixteen-year-old nephew, from whose viewpoint the story is told. The characters seem a little too colourful to be plausible, only a little, mind, but it was a little too much for me. Capote, I’m also going to point out, was good friends with Harper Lee, and there was speculation for many years that he actually wrote, or largely wrote, To Kill a Mockingbird and put it out under her name. To Kill a Mockingbird I think is quite different from what Capote work I’ve read, and far superior, so I don’t see how people could have believed that.

The other book I finished recently was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of the classics of Russian literature. I’ve never read a Russian novel before, and the only Realist novel I’ve read was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which did not compel me to read to its conclusion. I was rather disappointed with Crime and Punishment also. For a start, there was a lot of authorial intrusion, which irks me, though I doubt the average reader is even aware of the term. It basically means the author interjects opinions into the text, even though the author is this ethereal voice that exists beyond the text, on a different ontological plain if you want to get poncy about it. Modernist literature doesn’t do that, primarily because the Modernist movement was a reaction against the Realist fiction of the previous century. (This is what my dissertation is about, so I’ve been learning more about this lately). So authorial intrusion, I find, kind of takes one out of the story, because it’s like the director of a film jumping in with comment suddenly out of nowhere. The characters also seemed to lack psychological depth, or at least the psychological depth I like in Modernism. It’s debatable whether that’s true or not, but it would be accurate to say that in Realist fiction characters are defined through action and in Modernist fiction characters are defined through thought. I prefer the latter. So, yes, I saw the book through to the end, and I did feel a certain amount of intrigue waiting for the next twist of the plot, but every twist never quite satisfied me, and even I felt the title seemed unjustified: there was neither that much crime, nor that much punishment.

I’m starting a new Virginia Woolf book tonight though, so that might at least make me happier, though it will be Night and Day, her second novel, so not quite as ‘modernist’ as her later novels. Anyway, since there’s been so few updates recently, and really,  I have nothing new to show, I thought I’d drag out something old, from the archives you might say. So, in a minute, I shall paste in some poetry I wrote when I was a teenager, and a young one at that. Bad poetry, of course, the sort one does write as a teenager. I’d like to think I got marginally better over the years, but poetry has never been my forte. And, if you’d like, you can use the following three examples as instructional aids in how not to write a poem. Really, if you ever write anything resembling this, I recommend not showing it to anyone with any semblance of earnestness, only perhaps as a novelty five or more years afterwards.

No more than human

No need to speak,

there’s an eternity of words,

and sensations,

in every touch,

and with every touch,

millions of sensory neurones tingle,

as the heart flutters.

Slowly, nervously,

(anticipation makes the blood flow faster)

the covering is pulled away,

and, like candy,

no matter how beautiful the wrapping,

the inside is always sweeter,

expected and proven.

Every curve flaunts its perfection

in the soft ambience of the clouded sunlight,

the eyes know it,

the fingers know it,

the tongue knows it,

no more than human,

no less than love.

Love has no glory

Once upon a time,

Distance was our only division,

But love could not prevail,

You made too deep an incision

We had something once,

That distance could not take,

My dreams are still of you,

But the truth hurts when I awake

You took it away,

With his love that you returned,

Now we can’t go back,

Our crossed bridges we have burned

I hold on still,

To that distant memory,

It was only ever a dream really,

Love has no glory

Ropes and strings

Time like a spool

A reel ahead

A straight path laid out in

Red string

Two hearts tied together with

The strongest rope

Unbreakable

The strings just strengthened

The bond

Until

They got so tangled

There were too many of them

We lost sight of the rope

We weren’t sure whether it was still there

Any more

Or whether it was just the tangled

Spaghetti strings

Tying us together

Strangling us

Now came the scissors

The blood

The hurt

Cutting everything

Down to that central rope

It was still there

As strong as

ever

And if, for some reason, you liked reading these, perhaps in the way that I enjoy watching really shoddy, low-budget horror films, there’s plenty more where it came from. Just let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to post up some more. I might even dig out a few old teenage stories about vampires and angels and such for your delection.

P.S. My girlfriend illustrated Glitter and you can see the pictures over at Victoria Stitch.

Sat now, alone at the party, my can empty in my hand, dented in several places where I had absently crushed my thumb and fingers into it, I considered getting another one, scanning the crowd for either an opening I could push through, or someone worth talking to, and was just about to stand when an unfamiliar girl threw herself down onto the sofa next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was thin and sharp, with a narrow nose and green eyes that looked away as I met them; cheeks rose-tinted, vasodilated; hair the colour of dry leaves, or of beer held to the sun, sticking out like straw, jagged and uneven because she cut it herself. In her hands, which rested on the patchwork fabric lap of her dress, she held two slim bottles. I did not think she was pretty.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, pressing the lager can between my fingers until it clicked and crinkled.

“I’m Remi,” she said, laughing nervously. Her laugh was not musical. “My name’s kind of a joke.” She looked down at her hands, tapped her fingers on the glass of one of the bottles.

“Is it?”

She nodded and asked my name. After I told her there was a silence and we both looked down at the open bottles she held, I taking sideways glances at her, noticing that her body was thin, thinner than mine, slight, boyish, until she looked up at me, saw me looking and held out the nearest bottle.

“You want another beer?” she asked, “it’s better than a can.”

I took the bottle, finding the lightly-coloured liquid inside sweeter and less chemical than the lager. We began to talk, the people surrounding us, the party and the music, the bright light, dying away as she told me how she went to the same university as me, studied art, liked painting and bright colours, action and movement, mentioned Futurism, piquing my interest. In exchange, I told her about my writing, about Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Marcel Proust, worried I would sound pretentious, even as I took self-satisfied pride in reeling off their names, but she had not heard of them so could not judge me. She did not read much, or “enough”, she said, but would like to read something of mine some time, if I would show her. Of course I would, I said. She smiled against the rim of her bottle and looked over at two girls a few metres away, who giggled when they saw me looking and turned away. I felt embarrassed suddenly, back in the party, among all the other people, but separate, on the outskirts, with a stranger, an unknown girl who had brought me a beer and started a conversation. I caught a glimpse of Simon through a gap between two people, looking serious as he discussed something, a game probably, judging by who he spoke with, and I felt annoyed, annoyed that Remi should have watched me and spoken to her friends and come over here and sat by me with two beers in her hands and started talking to me. It annoyed me even as I appreciated the gesture, hypocrite that I am, because obviously, drunkenly, she had decided she had a crush on me, on the person sat alone on the sofa across the room of a party, she had said as much, when I made a joke, said that she “liked” me, though she did not, could not, know me, know where I had come from or who my past lovers had been, whether I was single or my girlfriend was absent, what I liked or disliked, whether I drank coffee or preferred cinnamon tea, whether I would rather have come to a party or stayed in tonight, whether I thought verisimilitude was more important in fiction than plot and dramatic event.

There was a break in our conversation, Remi reddened again, I silent, conflicted, looking blankly out across the crowd until I saw a face that was familiar but through several months’ absence had drifted beyond the bounds of immediate recollection, creating a brief pause before a name emerged: Nick. He called to me and came over, asked how I was, looked over at Remi. His hair was longer than when I had last seen it, and dyed black, though he still dressed in the same tight black band t-shirts and skinny-fit black jeans, broken only at his waist by a silver-shining belt buckle shaped like an audio cassette. I asked if he was here with Mike but, no, he said, Mike wasn’t there, they were no longer together but, seeing my face contort into condolence and regret, they were still friends, still hung around together, and it was weeks since they had broken up; they were both over it. I felt Remi’s awkwardness next to me, her sense of alienation, imagined empathetically her desire that I would turn to her and say truthfully, with conviction, “Nick, this is my girlfriend, Remi; Remi, this is Nick,” felt simultaneously still annoyed with her, or with myself, promising myself, as Nick continued to talk, that I would not fall in love with her, not right now, not straight away, not because she had shown some interest in me, whoever she was, adamant because of the beer, for which I had no tolerance, drinking it as rarely as I did, already tipsy and distrustful of my own perceptions, even after only one can and one bottle.

That I might already be falling for her, reciprocating her obvious feelings for the simple act of her coming over and bringing me a beer, disgusted me, but after Nick left, taking with him his great enthusiasm for everything and his overbearing laugh, I continued to talk with her and, as the party began to die down around two, as the hosts began to usher people towards the doors, Simon being lost in the crowd or outside already, Remi’s friends being abandoned or having abandoned her, we collected our coats and walked out together. Perhaps from the shock of the cold night air, or from moving after sitting and talking for so long, Remi suddenly went pale and darted out across the concrete forecourt of the house towards the kerb where she immediately bent over and vomited into a drain. Several people who still lingered in groups, some smoking, others waiting for stragglers still inside, watched the girl with mild interest and surprise, but did not move to help her, perhaps assuming that, because I had been stood with her, I would be the one to go over. When I did she stood and her face flushed, though the bright red of her cheeks was harder to discern in the street-light than the glistening of the watery sick across the bars of the drain cover. I asked if she was alright.

“I am now.” She wiped her mouth with a tissue pulled from her coat pocket, then held out and squinted at strands of her hair to see if they had been caught in the sudden cascade. They shone in the light but appeared to be dry.

“It’s cold,” she said, letting the hair fall back into place and pulling from her pockets some fleece mittens with cats-paw designs on their underside.

“I didn’t think you’d drunken that much,” I said.

She shrugged, “I didn’t eat before I came out,” then she added, quickly, for she had seen her friends come out through the front door, “will you walk me home? It’s not far, just a couple of streets away.” She gestured vaguely in the direction opposite to my house and my mind flashed to the walk home alone, to Simon walking alone also, unless anyone else went that way, then to Don Quixote, to the chivalric knights-errant he idolised, briefly to the characters of my novel, meeting for the first time in a café, spontaneously striking up conversation, embarking so easily, with so little provocation, implausibly even, at the behest of the author, for the convenience of the narrative on the same ‘quest’ together. It must happen, I thought, that people meet at cafés and strike up conversation, just as they do at parties, and that Remi came over and talked to me was proof of that, for which I should thank her.

“Sure,” I said, feeling for my mp3 player and headphones in the inside pocket of my coat. Music, the music of Dashboard Confessional perhaps, who I enjoyed, I told myself, ironically, would be my companion home, while chivalry, ‘being a gentleman’, served as an excuse to walk her home. Remi smiled and introduced me to her friends when they reached us, a blond-haired girl named Alice and the other with dark hair called Helen, who said they were going to a club, did Remi, or both of us, want to come? No, said Remi, she was going home and I would walk her. There was a note of pride in her voice, and the look she shared with Alice was meaningful and private, as if she had said something further telepathically. I watched the two girls leave and looked for Simon but did not see him because, as I discovered later, he had already left.

“Shall we go?” Remi asked.

I turned away from the people outside the house, abandoning my search for Simon and nodded at the girl in the red coat who stood with arms folded against the cold, breath coming in small bursts from between her colourless lips. My hands in my pocket clutching, but not wearing, my leather gloves, we began our walk, in silence, along the monochrome pavement, legs lit up, casting dancing shadows in occasionally passing headlights. I wondered if she understood the thrill of walking down nocturnal streets where the only sound was the distant whoosh of night-time traffic and leaves skittering and stepped-on on the pavement, the thrill of being here rather than anywhere else, at night, moving between amber pools in the darkness, thinking about the people warm and asleep in the passing houses, about the students and workers rowdy in the city centre, drinking, revelling, Helen and Alice gone too, dissatisfied with the party, insatiable, to join them, while Remi and I were neither asleep nor dancing, but here, frosty air on our skin, bodies warm beneath our coats, sharing a silent walk. I could not know what she was thinking, whether she longed only for her bed, in a room I had never seen, if she was too nervous to speak, her confidence and conversation having evaporated with the end of the party, no longer having the people around, her two friends, to support her. Perhaps she still felt sick, I thought as I looked at her nose and saw in her profile a kind of sharp prettiness. I asked her, but she said she felt fine, had “got it all out,” now felt sober and cold. The final word, spoken as she looked at me, as we passed beneath the full glare of a street-light, sounded like an invitation to pull her close and put my arm around her, but I did not.

We passed only two other people on our walk: a man in his twenties with shoulders hunched beneath a black hoodie, who caused me to draw close enough to Remi to brush against her shoulder so he could go by, and an older man, on the other side of a different street, who had a pipe in his mouth and held, at the end of a lead, a darkly-coloured Labrador. To my observation that it seemed late to be walking a dog, Remi smiled and said “this city is full of strange people.” I replied that anywhere you go has strange people. Remi nodded and was silent, ending our brief, meaningless conversation, though with no regret on my part because no longer, now that we had passed who we were, what we did, what we liked, was our conversation forced, instead could come and go as it pleased, comfortably, and was free to be entirely pointless, even if as banal as pointing out that it was late to walk a dog. I supposed we would be friends.

“Here’s my road,” Remi said regretfully as we came onto an even quieter terraced street further away from the main road than the house-party house had been. “I’d invite you in, but my parents will be asleep.”

“Don’t you live with those girls from earlier?” I asked.

“No, I liked my room here too much to leave,” Remi said, leading me now up the path towards a front door overhung with ivy, lowering her voice as if it would rise up through the windows and wake everyone inside. “And I’d rather save on rent and spend the money on art supplies.” She unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Wait here a moment,” she said, disappearing into the dark hallway, fumbling around at a desk for a moment and then returning with a pen in her hand. “I couldn’t find any paper,” she said, “so give me your arm.”

I asked why and she said that she wanted to give me her phone number. When I suggested why not just type it into my phone she giggled, covered her mouth to stifle the sound and said that perhaps she was not as sober as she had thought. I handed her my phone and the keys lit up beneath her jabbing thumb.

“Text me sometime when you’re bored,” she said, handing the phone back to me.

When I had typed in her name and put it back in my pocket, she stepped back out onto her front step, in her socks because she had already kicked her shoes off, and hugged me, tightly, but genuinely, without desperation, so I could feel her arms through my coat, and thanked me for walking her home. I left, mind blank, filled only with the echoing hollow music from my headphones, feeling nothing as I walked, barely thinking about Remi or the night or anything. Back at my own house, through the black metal gate that creaked and the wooden back door that had swollen with the cold, filling the frame so that it caught and protested when pushed open, I found Leo and Simon in the kitchen, both in night-clothes; one in shorts, the other in baggy tartan trousers, both wearing faded t-shirts and flushed with the heat from the radiators. Simon, who leant against the worktop waiting for the kettle to boil, shivered in the blast of cold air from the open door, while I recoiled against the wall of heat.

“It’s hot in here,” I said, squeezing through the doorway into the adjacent living room, past Leo who stood against the frame, noticing, as I pulled off my scarf, let my long coat fall onto the sofa, the wry smile the two of them directed at me, realising that they had been talking. I looked at them quizzically, waiting for an answer.

Leo broke the silence: “I hear you’ve been chatting up girls,” he said.

I pushed past him again, pulled a mug from the shelf and placed it next to Simon’s, dropping, a moment later, a single round teabag into it. Then I leant against the draining-board, opposite and diagonal to Simon, and shrugged. Simon stared attentively at me while Leo pressed the matter, asking who she was, but I said I did not know her. The kettle shook, then clicked, and Simon turned to fill the two mugs.

“You were talking to her for a long time,” he said, looking sideways at me as he swirled the bags around in the darkening liquid, “you must have learned something about her.”

“If you were curious, why didn’t you come over?” I said peevishly. Simon did not answer, instead scooped the limp teabag from his mug and dropped it into the bin, returning the spoon to the counter to allow me to do the same while he reached down to retrieve a bottle of milk from the fridge. I moved over to pick up the spoon and asked him in a less defensive way why he had left so early without telling me. He replied, straightening up and pouring the white liquid into his tea, that it was firstly because he had had the opportunity to walk most of the way home with his friend, and secondly because he had looked over and I was still talking to “that girl”. He passed the milk to me while Leo, bored and impatient, interjected a question about her physical attractiveness.

“She’s more Simon’s type,” I replied, again surprising myself with the defensive tone in my voice. Simon shrugged and sipped his tea. “She was sick after you left,” I volunteered, the ceramic side of my mug hot against my enclosing fingers, wanting again to compensate for the harsh tone that seemed to spring up from the inexplicable and vague annoyance thoughts of Remi created within me. “She threw up in the street, so I walked her home.”

“Did you kiss her?” Leo asked, stretched up now and swinging with his fingertips on the top of the door-frame like a bored child.

“With the taste of sick in her mouth? I already told you I don’t like her.”

Leo shrugged and left, no longer interested in our company, while mine and Simon’s conversation turned briefly to another subject before we each went to our bedrooms. I was tired, and so did not stay up long, but as I lay in bed I thought of Remi’s arms tight around my shoulders, and that brought to my mind my first embrace with Lila, by the creaking black gate on that cold September evening. That had been more than a year before, and had filled me with warmth and optimism, expectation, while Remi’s embrace, genuine as it was, felt insubstantial, inspired in me nothing more than indifference and mild resistance, had been even mildly uncomfortable, squeezing my chest, my lungs, causing me to gasp silently the cutting air. It had barely registered in this gasp how scentless her body was, though I realised now I had noticed only the faintest aroma of shampoo when she pressed against me, no lingering perfume like Lila had worn, no smell of alcohol or clothes or anything, but perhaps that was the cold, blocking up my nose or suppressing all scent so that I could not smell and be repulsed by her vomit on the drain, could observe it detachedly as I now recalled the hug. And yet I wondered why I was thinking about the hug from this girl at all, this girl who I had claimed already to my housemates that I did not like, why I would compare it with my first embrace of Lila, whom I had had strong feelings for at the time. True it did not happen every day that a girl would so blatantly flirt with me, would hug me, but I would not fall in love with her for that, I would not fall in love with her, I was adamant, though it seemed inevitable, and I fell asleep nursing that thought: I would not fall in love with her.

But yes, I am being uncharacteristically frivolous for this one time of year: I spent £60 today alone, without really meaning too. That was more selfish though: I’ve essentially bought two of my presents, both because they were on special offer, and so cheaper than my parents would have found them for (both videogames too of course). Now I find out that this one game I asked for, and bought today after failing to contact my father because the deal was amazing and ended today, has already been purchased for me. Usually my father doesn’t get around to Christmas shopping until at least the 15th, sometimes the 20th or later. Who’d have thought he’d get his act together this year? Still, I’m sure it can be easily sorted. What I’m more worried about is lugging all these gifts home, since I’ve elected to go on a train rather than get picked up a day later.

Aside from being uncharacteristically frivolous, I’ve also been uncharacteristically happy of late. I’m worried it might have a negative impact on my writing, because I haven’t done any for about two weeks. The reason for this happiness? I, who write so pessimistically about relationships, have somehow stumbled into one quite unexpectedly and pleasantly. Really, I don’t feel things could be better at the moment, though I’m sure it won’t take me long to find something to be depressed about. Hopefully anyway, or my writing career might be over. Is it ironic that loneliness makes me feel contented, and happiness makes me suspicious? Probably not, it’s just strange.

I suppose that’s not the only reason for my lack of new material though: I was ill for a few days and had to pretty much stay in bed for three days, and only managed a walk to the shops for some much needed food on the fourth. All I could do was lie there playing videogames and watching internet tv. It was terrible. But on the first day I was well, my girlfriend came over and we made a gingerbread house, in honour of Annual Family Gift Day and because we like making gingerbread together. Actually, I make gingerbread with a lot of people. I’m a gingerbread whore.

It’s not the best gingerbread house I’ve ever seen, but it turned out better than I excpected it would when we first tried to stick the walls together, and I don’t think it’s bad for a first attempt. It tasted pretty good too. Obviously that’s my girlfriend on the left in the second and third pictures, looking better than me and my unstyled hair (hmm, I hope she doesn’t mind me putting pictures of her on the ‘net…). You can read her blog here, or at least look at the pretty pictures.

One last thing before I round off this post: for a while it was my goal to get this site in the top one million on the Alexa Ranking, because it hovered around 1,000,500 for ages. Recently, it not only past that arbritrary goal, but got in the top 900,000, and is currently fluctuating around that number. So thank you to everyone who reads my site, I hope you stick with it through these occasional droughts and like it enough to show other people. I’ve pretty much finished at uni for the year now, and my girlfriend will be going home for Christmas, so I should have some time and some loneliness to spur on some writing I can put up here.

Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

“Oh you poor dear,” the woman exclaimed, seeing the blood running from his elbow, his knee, the side of his finger.

The student looked up at her, pale, shaken, saw a woman also pale, with freckles across her nose and straight, reddish-brown hair down past her shoulders, helping to move his bike off his leg. The cardigan she wore was tight around her thin arms. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Did you hit your head?” she asked. “Do you need an ambulance?”

“No,” the student said slowly, stretching and contracting his limbs.

“Are you alright to stand?” the woman asked, helping him up. “Come inside, I’ve got a first aid box.” In the shock of the moment she had forgotten her usual shyness.

The student seemed about to protest but, looking down at the rent in his jeans and the blood seeping into the denim, allowed himself to be lead into the small front yard of the woman’s small terraced house. While he stood there, feeling awkward. a cold numbness that was worse and more mysterious than pain gnawing at his injuries, she went back to pick up his bike and bring it through the gate.

“I think the wheel’s gotten bent,” she said as she brought it through, but he had seen that before she said it. He frowned and she looked regretful as she opened the front door.

She lead him through a short hallway and asked him to take a seat in the living room while she went to fetch her medical box. He perched on the edge of a red settee and plucked a few tissues from a box on the low Ikea coffee table, nervous of dripping blood on the carpet or furniture. Through the window, the weak autumn sun, filtered by the remaining yellowed leaves on the nearest of the trees that lined this street, illuminated a silent sitting room that smelled faintly of furniture polish and pot pourri. In the corner near the window stood an inexpensive, though quite large, flat-screen television, in the opposite corner a tall lamp, in another corner, set into one of the alcoves either side of the fireplace, a bookshelf half filled with books and half with DVDs and a few old VHSs. The student did not have time to read the titles of many of these before the woman returned, holding a white plastic box, a beige towel, and a matching flannel that steamed in what the student now realised was the cold air of the room.

The woman sat down next to him, her knees together, turned towards him, the lower half of her legs bent away from him against the front of the sofa. She put the folded towel down on the cushion between them.

“Take your shirt off,” she instructed.

Self-consciously the student slid his arm out through the sleeve, lay the shirt down, bloodied side up, over the arm of the settee, allowed the woman to lift his arm with her slender cool fingers. The warm touch of the flannel against his elbow raised goose-pimples in the surrounding skin. When the woman had dabbed a few times and removed it, an uneven circle of the beige had been stained a watercolour-red. The woman looked up at his face.

“Sorry,” she said, “the house is always cold.”

The student smiled thinly, still looked concerned, said nothing as the woman dried the damp skin with a corner of the towel. This too absorbed some of the redness.

“Oh, don’t worry about these,” she said, “they’re old and I never use them anyway.”

With the blood gone they could both see that the injury was just a scrape; some torn and grazed skin. The woman reached in the box for a pack of sterile gauze padding, tore it open in a quick, neat motion.

“Do you live here alone?” the student asked as she pressed the gauze against his skin, reached for surgical tape and scissors.

She looked up again, surprised at the question, her fingers still clasped lightly around his arm.

“Yes,” she said.

The student thought he detected a sadness, a loneliness, in her eyes, but then felt that, no, it was not located there but seemed to hang permanently around her like a shroud, making her seem older than she was. He worried that the one thing he had said to her had been wrong, so he quickly said,

“Thanks for doing this. I don’t think we even have Elastoplasts at home.”

“Where do you live?”

“A few streets away, near the cemetery.”

The woman put her hand on his wrist and gently bent his arm. The student felt the tape pull tight against his skin, but it did not tear or come away.

“Shall I do your knee or your finger next?” she asked.

The student twisted his hand round to look at the side of his smallest finger. It ached when he flexed it, but did not seem badly cut or damaged.

“I don’t think my finger’s too bad,” he said.

The woman wiped it with another part of the flannel.

“No, it’s not too bad,” she said, “I have a small plaster if you’d like.”

“I think it’s stopped bleeding, it should be alright.”

The woman felt a strong urge to kiss the finger, or the back of his hand, but she resisted.

“Shall we look at your knee then?” she asked.

They both looked down at the bloody patch on the knee. The strangeness of the situation, of being suddenly in this woman’s house, tended by her, had begun to dissolve, but now he felt awkward again. She mustn’t kneel down in front of me, he felt.

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“I don’t mind.”

He guessed she was fifteen, at most twenty, years older than him. If she was twenty years older, that would make her twice his age. She seemed sort of faded, he thought, as if she had spent her life in autumn days; like a violet pressed between the pages of a book.

He bent forwards to pull and roll up his jeans. The friction of the denim, soft as it was from years of wear, rubbed against the cut, renewing its pain and smearing the inside of the material with a thin line of red. It would have been easier to just pull them down, but it would have been too awkward to sit there with this stranger in just his t-shirt and shorts.

“It doesn’t look as bad as your elbow,” she said, leaning forwards to inspect it, “bring it up here and I’ll put a pad on it.”

She moved the towel and patted the cushion next to her. He pulled off his shoe, brought his bare knee up next to her and held his shin with clasped hands. Their heads came close together and a curtain of her hair fell forwards, parallel with his knee. She reached up to tuck It behind her ear and continued to dab with the cooling flannel. Neither spoke nor looked at the other while she worked, only at the knee.

“All done.”

He ran his finger over the dressing, felt the strangeness of its unfeeling mass against his skin.

“Thank you,” he said, putting his foot back on the floor.

“It’s a shame about your jeans,” she said.

“Most of my jeans have holes in anyway.”

“Oh,” she said. The tone of the utterance expressed both concern and sympathy.

“I like them that way, in summer they’re cooler than shorts.”

There was a pause, a silence that stretched beyond the small living room, beyond the cold house, right down to either end of the street.

“Do you have any more injuries?” Her voice was quiet.

“I don’t think so, I suppose I –”

She reached up suddenly and stroked the side of his jaw, feeling beneath her fingers the soft stubble.

“Sorry,” she said, drawing her hand back.

He said nothing. She was looking at him, but he could not read her expression.

“You might stay a few minutes more,” she said, almost as a question, “wait a few minutes before you put a strain on the cuts.”

From his silence she assumed acquiescence, and reached up again, this time to his neck. He allowed himself to be pulled towards her, and downwards, until his head rested on her lap. He could see, sideways now, the coffee table, and beyond it the unlit fireplace, and before it the blurred horizon of her knees, and he could smell the scent of her dress; the faintest aroma of cotton and perfume and dust. On the lower shelf of the coffee table lay a DVD case with the title ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and on the top of the coffee table was a paperback he had not noticed before, the underside, or topside, of its splayed pages facing him so that he could see neither its title nor author. The woman began to play with his hair, twisting its short tufts around her finger and then tracing winding patterns through the haphazard strands. She was not so very old, but she felt that she had lived here for a very long time.

“Do you read much?” she asked, “does anyone your age read any more?”

“I read,” he said, “but probably not as much as I should.”

His hands were down by his thighs, his fingers and thumbs moving and twisting against each other. He was tempted to reach up and run his hand along her calf, feel the plastic friction of her tights beneath his palm, reciprocate the familiar way with which she had touched the damaged parts of his body and now played with his hair, but he did not.

“In the book I’m reading,” she began, “a man and a woman make love, and start to fall in love, but the man does not like her hands. Her fingers are too short and fat and inelegant. He says they are ugly, calls them child’s hands. He thinks she’s beautiful, but he can’t help but focus on her hands. It’s a really big deal for him, so big that he calls off the relationship, though it’s not yet explained why it was such a big deal. I don’t know if it will be.”

Her voice was quiet, demure, yet passionate and honest. He could imagine, as he lay there, the warmth of her lap rising up through his cheek, her reading a bed-time story to a child.

“Later on, years later” she continued, “the man finds the woman all wasted in a street in Milan. He broke her heart, ruined her, and she turned to drugs and prostitution. Her skin is all grey , her face is drawn, her eyes are dull; he can’t see the spark of life and love that once was there, only a murky cloud of despair. He’s moved to tears as he kneels down in front of her, and she seems only dimly to recognise him, but he takes her hands and holds them and apologises to her. Then he realises that her hands haven’t changed, they’re still just the same, as he remembered them, and now he thinks they’re beautiful. He kisses them and falls in love with them, and with her, and promises he’ll look after her.”

Outside, the sun had disappeared beyond the roofs of the houses opposite and the breeze had become stiffer, causing the black bag with leaves in it to shudder and crinkle loudly.

“That’s as far as I’ve got,” the woman finished, apologetically. “I suppose it sounds trashy.”

A car drove by the house, its tires creating a wet, sticky sound as they rolled over the fallen leaves.

“I’ve always thought I have nice hands, that they’re my best feature. I used to be able to play the piano.”

In the stress she put on the I, there seemed implicit the statement that no one else had ever said so. The student felt that he should reach up and enclose her fingers within his own and tell her that she did have nice, soft, delicate, feminine hands, but instead he was thinking about something else:

“The other day,” he said, “there was this insect on the glass of our back door, which is the one we use to come in and go out by. I think it was some sort of grasshopper, but it might have been a cricket. It was brilliantly, intensely green. It had long elegant legs. I was a little afraid of it. I wondered what it was doing there, and especially at this time of year, but then I closed the door and thought no more about it.”

He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but did not turn to look. Her hand was now still, fingers curled against the bone behind his ear.

“The next day I noticed it lying on the doormat inside our kitchen. Someone had trodden on it and it was squashed into the material, its long legs sticking out pathetically. Over the following couple of days I noticed it getting more and more trodden in, and soon it had lost its bright green and become brown with dirt. I don’t suppose anyone else noticed it, or they just ignored it. It’s still there now, looking just the same as a piece of chewing gum stuck to a pavement.”

His words trailed into silence, and then he suddenly sat up and looked at his watch. His hair was flattened on the side he had been lying on, but stuck out where the woman had been playing with it.

“I’d better go,” he said, “I was supposed to have been at my girlfriend’s house by now.”

He pulled his shoe back on. The spell of spontaneous intimacy had been broken. Now he stood, and the woman escorted him to the door, watched as he wheeled his bicycled out the front gate. There was grating sound as the distorted part of the wheel passed the break pads, but the sound was only slight. He mounted the saddle.

“You be careful,” the woman warned.

“Thank you,” the student said.

Their final look into each other’s faces was brief. Twilight suited her, he thought, and she was quite beautiful. He pushed down on his pedal, lifted his other foot from the ground, and began a cautious journey along the pavement. The woman watched him until he disappeared at the end of the street, and then fetched in her broom and dropped the half-empty black bag into the bin. She realised, as she went back into the living room to retrieve the towel and the flannel and her white medical box and switch on a light, that she had never asked his name, nor given hers, but felt that somehow it was better that way. As she bent to pick up the towel she noticed on the coffee-table, next to the tissue box, a few crumpled blood-stained tissues; his blood, discarded like leaves from a tree.

It was Saturday morning. Her hair had recently been the colour of candy floss, and before that, shocking pink, but had since faded to the bleached milky hue of evening clouds. Several strands of it clung to the brush. She turned.

“Are you still here?”

It was a joke.

She plucked a tangle of hair from the brush’s plastic spines and nonchalantly let it fall from outstretched fingers into the bin. The previous night’s nail-varnish, chipped in places, still clung to her nails. She was beautiful; he was her audience.

“What shall you do today?” he asked.

Her reflection began to apply eye-liner, its eye very wide open, lashes fluttering slightly.

“I suppose I’ll meet friends in town, or I’ll do some drawing.”

The mirror was set into a dressing table that must be old, but he did not know whether it had come with the room or she had brought it from home.

“How about you?”

She put the eye-pencil down on the untreated pine, where it rolled against a pot of lime-green nail-varnish. She picked up a tube of mascara. The dressing table was integral to her, symbolic of her. It often appeared in her candy-gothic illustrations like a signature. In the drawings it was less cluttered.

“Write, or play videogames.”

He shrugged. Beneath his bare elbow the sheets were still warm, but he could not tell whether from only from his own body-heat, or from hers as well. They smelled of her, and when he moved, the scent was disturbed. Above the bed’s head was draped a line of unlit fairy-lights.

She looked at him, smiled. When he left they did not kiss goodbye. They only kissed when they fucked.

~ ~ ~

He picked at a foil tray of leftover Chinese takeaway.

“That’s been out all night,” Gemma said.

“I like it when it’s cold.”

Sometimes they watched films together. This morning she had asked to use his computer to do some work. He sat back on his bed and watched her. He often felt she worked harder than him, and he admired her for it. Sometimes her work would stress her, she would lose confidence in herself, but she never asked for his support, only his dispassionate love. He was drawn to her independence. He rarely thought of her when he wrote.

She frowned at the screen. Tim put down the empty tray, picked up a conker that lay on his desk, began to toss it from hand to hand. The sky through the window was clear, but the winter sun was weak. He frowned, the conker moved faster. She looked at him, then back at the screen. She was wearing strawberry-mousse coloured pyjamas. Her fingers tapped on the keyboard.

“There was this time,” he began, still looking out the window, “I went to my cousins’ house. They had just moved into this new house on this estate. The house was new, and everything in it was new. It smelled of plastic. I was in the living room and there were my two cousins there as well. I was about eleven and my cousin was five or six, and her brother was just a baby. We never saw them that often. I don’t know where my aunt or my mum were, but it was just the three of us in the living room and I was sitting on this new leather sofa.”

He paused, but did not turn from the window.

“My cousin used to like to sit in my lap, or maybe anyone’s lap. I was sat there, watching TV or something I suppose, and she jumped up and started bouncing and shuffling on my lap. I was kind of ignoring her, watching the TV or whatever, but it felt kind of weird. I guess I got kind of, we used to say a ‘stiffy’ at primary school, and it felt kind of good, then it felt like I needed to pee, so I moved her off me and went into this little toilet-room.

“The toilet seat was made of this really smooth varnished wood. I lifted it up and pulled down my pants. I had sort of a semi, and there was this sticky stuff at the end, I didn’t know what it was, but when I touched it it felt kind of tingly. I don’t know what I was thinking about, not my cousin, not anything really, but I started to rub. My hand was shaking. Then after a few minutes I came, into the perfectly white toilet bowl. But it wasn’t, like, proper, it just sort of dribbled out. I got some on my fingers. Then I washed it off, and I flushed, and I went back into the living room like nothing had happened, but didn’t let her sit on my lap again.”

He looked at Gemma. Her hand rested on the computer’s mouse. Their eyes met, then she looked back at the screen.

“I felt guilty as hell afterwards, like I knew I’d done something wrong, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. I was terrified my aunt or my mum would find out and tell me off, but at the same time I kind of wanted them to, so it was done with and I didn’t have to think about it any more. I really hate that feeling, that sick-guilt when you’re a kid, when you don’t know how the world or anything works and you’re terrified of grown-ups because they have all the power over everything. I didn’t stop being afraid of what would happen if I touched myself until years later. Sometimes I still feel guilty about it, like I did her wrong, hurt her somehow.”

He fell silent. Gemma turned off his computer and stood. When she left, she squeezed his hand. The walls of his room felt tight around him.

(The above illustrations can be seen full size at Victoria Stitch’s blog.)

“I can’t stay long, I’m afraid, but I couldn’t leave again without calling in to see you. It’s not a bad time, is it?”

Jonathan said it was not, invited her in, asked her how she was, if he could get her a drink, apologised for being in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He felt again nervous and excited in her presence, as if those feelings had been lying dormant all these years. He had thought never to see her again. He made tea, led her through to the living room where his daughter sat playing with wooden blocks.

“Hi there,” Michelle said kneeling in front of the child, “what’s your name?”

The child lifted her hand, clenched around a red block, and spoke into her fist.

“Sh-Shelly,” she said.

Jonathan, putting the two mugs on the coffee table, sitting on the sofa, felt colour rise in his cheeks. Michelle told the child it was a pretty name and asked how old she was. Shelly was four. She had her mother’s straight blond hair and her mother’s wide blue eyes. Michelle sat.

“So you married Hannah?”

“Yes,” Jonathan said.

“Is she in?”

“No, she works Saturdays.”

Michelle lamented that she had not been able to keep in touch with either of them, the three of them having been close at university, but since Michelle had gone to Africa to teach, it had been so hard to keep up with all her old friends. Oh, but how rewarding it was to work out there, to see their faces light up with each new wonder revealed on the blackboard.

Jonathan caught only the sense of what she was saying, rather than the words, too lost in the fact that she was here, in front of him, her wavy brown hair, the colour of chocolate almost, but with an inflection of red, shaking as she laughed in the same way she had laughed at university. Yes, Jonathan remembered exactly how she had laughed at university, those days, those sensations, etched into his mind, thought about, not every day, but often, very often. And he remembered how she had cried too, that one day when she came to him, because her boyfriend had left her, and he had held her and thought “now, now’s my chance.”

But it had taken until the final exam party the following year for Jonathan, drunk, to ask her. But they were “just friends,” she said, and those were two words that could change a life in a heartbeat. And he had known even then, even through the alcohol-haze, that he would never get over that: that they were “just friends”. Then, the following summer, Michelle set off to travel the world, to “help people”, she said, which was so like her because she was, she really was, just a wonderful person.

“Well that’s enough about me,” Michelle said, “what about you?”

What was there to say? He had a job as a bathroom salesman, had married Michelle’s friend Hannah, had bought a house, had reproduced. He looked at Shelly, still playing with her blocks, building a tower. Michelle looked too. The child was definitely Hannah’s daughter but, of course, Jonathan had chosen the name because, really, Michelle was a beautiful name that melted on the tongue like chocolate.

“It’s a shame Hannah isn’t in. I’m sorry I missed your wedding.”

Jonathan was too. He had looked for her in the crowd, when the vicar had asked the question, when everyone sat with bated breath waiting for his answer, for those two words which could change a life, though he knew that she was in some far-flung corner of the world helping some poor unfortunate souls. “I do,” he had said finally, after that excruciating pause. And, if Michelle had been there, would he have thought twice before he committed to blond-haired Hannah? He looked at Michelle, whose brown eyes were fixed on her namesake. She’s here now, Jonathan thought, on this Saturday afternoon.
It could not last though, this brief, this significant reunion: like those blurry vivacious days at university it was over all too quickly when Michelle looked at her watch and stood and said,

“I’m sorry, but I really have to go: I’m only in the country for a few days,”

and then they were standing again on the doorstep saying goodbye.

“Perhaps I’ll see you in another ten years,” Jonathan said.

Michelle laughed and hugged him.

“Hopefully sooner than that,” she said, “I’ll try harder to keep in touch.”

She kissed him on the cheek and felt his stubble on her lips. Jonathan noticed that she smelled the same way she had ten years before and realised he never had found out what perfume she wore. She let go of him.

“And give my love to Hannah,” Michelle said.

She was leaving now. Jonathan wanted to say something to make her stay, or perhaps he wanted to go with her. He looked into her eyes, felt twenty again, felt lost and hopeful, felt all the things he had felt when he had held her and comforted her, when he had stared at her across classrooms, across grass fields on summer afternoons, when he had worked up the courage to ask her out. Then there came a clattering from the living room and the wail of a child.

“I’d better go see about that,” Jonathan said.

“Yeah,” Michelle said, “I’ve got to go, sorry I couldn’t stay longer.”

“It’s okay,” Jonathan said, “Good luck with your teaching, take care of yourself.”

“You too,” Michelle said. She turned away and walked to her car. With a wave she was gone and Jonathan was closing the door, walking back to the living room. There he found Shelly sitting amongst scattered wooden blocks. Her tower had fallen down.