[1985]

The Nature of Things
The panther rippled sleek through the proud grasses, green eyes searching, shining.
Beauty and grace and perfect motion, rich, dark fur, a furnace within; green eyes searching, shining.
Nostrils dilating, tail flicking, muscles flowing in swift pounce of death; green eyes searching, finding.

[1991]

I used to believe in the redemptive power of beauty – that if you surrounded yourself with works of art, rich fabrics and furnishings your soul would be uplifted, elevated above every evil act – a Wildean fable of sensuality in which lust masqueraded as sternest purity, a whiff of decadence, of sickliness. It was an impossible ideal, yet continues to exert a fascination. A life purged, incense, bells and embroidery, stained glass, vivid colour. It was never a matter of simple vanity or affectation – in the natural world beauty, the ornamental and the functional are intertwined – shimmering hummingbirds. Artifice is the very perpetuation of nature, its validation – plumage, horns, beaks, extravagant to the point of excess. Good is pallid, sterile. The flush of a wine-warmed cheek, the fingers dripping with balm, these are transient and by virtue of that transience poignant, fragile, in bloom suffused with a sweet and alarming hint of decay, the autumn swirl, how much more intriguing than cold chastity, how much more human.

[2007]

We might have been shabby, but we nurtured compensatory aesthetic sensibilities as we dreamed of the next plate of chocolate porridge (with a sprinkle of cinnamon), trudging through the streets, eyes fixed on the pavement not to avoid the dog-laid landmines, but scanning for dropped coins (or the occasional pound note blowing along the gutter). If we had been a little less proud, we might even have resorted to the tramps’ tactic of visiting phone booths and inserting a probing finger in the returned coins slot in hope of a jackpot. To survive the poverty induced by a corrupt landlord whose eviction method was increasing the rent from one month to the next until the grant money ran out we banished the crude and vulgar from our unheated rooms, retreating behind the glass-panelled door, allowing nothing from the outside to intrude.

The grey relieved only by graffitied initials, peeling paint on neglected walls. Beauty is the dandelion growing from the pavement crack, the buddleia with its butterfly attendants in the gap site, roots anchored in the rubble of demolished dwellings, anarchic, tenacious, surprising.

[For Waterhot]

“‘Death is a great price to pay for a red rose,’ cried the Nightingale, ‘and Life is very dear to all. It is pleasant to sit in the green wood and to watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent of the hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?’”
Oscar Wilde, The Nightingale and the Rose

In desolate hours of loneliness with the curtains still open I would sit on the bare floorboards of the flat, tears trickling down the side of my nose before losing themselves in the warm folds of tissue, the telephone taunting me with its silence as the daylight gave way to the orange glow of the streetlights, shadows of the leaves dancing on the wall. Brooding a rare luxury squeezed in between my lover’s departure and my son being dropped off with the nanny after their weekend at her boyfriend’s. The intoxicating intensity, every ounce of passion spent only to have him torn from me. Nausea would flood me at the thought of him returning to the bosom of his family after he had announced flatly that the best solution would be for her breast cancer to have spread to her lymphatic system (which would mean that he could both inherit her considerable wealth and abscond with me guilt-free). In my selfish agony, the sheer callousness of his statement did not sink in.

I do not shudder back to the present from warm daydreams of what might have been. Even THAK does not haunt my waking thoughts (although he occasionally intrudes on my dreams) since I faded unobtrusively from his life (my preferred, non-confrontational resolution to relationships as opposed to a violent caesura). I have no curiosity about what has become of my past loves, with the exception of the briefest of my liaisons (Graham) and the admirer who languished after me during our secondary schooldays without my noticing (or at least consciously acknowledging his interest), IM, too preoccupied was I pursuing another in vain. The mere thought of bumping into one of them accidentally makes me queasy (though as I live in exile the likelihood is remote). My instinct would be instant appraisal, had he outperformed me? Does he outearn me? Had whatever creature he had in tow aged better than me? Was she wittier or had he deliberately selected less of a challenge?

The best scenario would be from the Human League’s song Louise describing former lovers crossing paths: “When he saw her getting off the bus, It seemed to wipe away the years, Her face was older, just a little rough, But her eyes were still so clear”. There is no sign of enmity: “She took a moment just to recognise, The man she’d known so well before, And as he started to apologise, Lose any bitterness she bore, She gently put her finger on his lips, To let him know she understood, And with her suitcase standing on the floor, Embraced him like a lover would”. They part with hope and the tantalising knowledge of possibility: “And though they talked for just a little while, Before she said she had to go, He saw the meeting as a tiny sign, That told him all he had to know, And so Louise, Waved from the bus, And as she left, She gave that smile, As if they were still lovers”.
However, the last twinge of longing ceased long ago when the train pulled into the station at Luxembourg. I used to stare along the platform in case he was waiting. If he had abandoned his flat and could tolerate being placed under constant surveillance he may well have moved back home, after all he did protest that his love for her had been mysteriously rekindled.

Again I look to Kosztolányi, more profound than Wilde, a shrewder judge of human foibles, whose worldly sophistication is preserved in exquisite poetry and prose. His character, the student, reveals how wistfulness can fester and become pathological, how grief can be confused with its comforting simulation, how when all yearnings have been condensed into an erotically charged fantasy the sheer banality of real life can never compete, never surpass the sublime torture conjured up by our imagination. What is lost can never be recaptured. Nor would we really want it back if we had the choice.

Dezső Kosztolányi, Krisztina Hrussz’s Miraculous Visit (1911)

The cabaret singer Krisztina Hrussz was buried on 7th January 1902. The funeral took place at three in the afternoon. The frost had set in and it had grown completely dark by the time the coffin was brought out into the courtyard and placed on top of the timber catafalque for the last rites to be performed before putting it on the hearse. The priest’s nose had turned cherry-red from the cold. An aftertaste of lunch lingered in his mouth, the slightly acrid bouquet of the Badacsony wine. In the mist he could now see angels and roses. With a stiff movement, he lifted the aspergillum onto the coffin. Medical student Vidor Tass, the singer’s sweetheart, stood by his side, the centre of attention in his careless black attire, elegantly retaining his composure, not betraying his grief. Around him a few second-rate thespians, a proper actor and the cabaret director. Almost all of them felt good, here, in the midst of mourning and they were thinking of their lunch. Lascivious and opulent feelings lent a hint of piquancy to the seriousness of the heartfelt emotion. Later, once the service had ended, and the horses had set off for the cemetery, the black plumes of mourning attached to their brow bands vibrating, between the torch and lantern-bearers, freezing rain began to fall, which coated the coffin with a delicate film of ice creating the impression from the outside that it was made of glass. The top hats also became encrusted with a thin glassy layer. This cold and sparkling covering spread over everything, transforming objects to glass and sugared chestnut, the tarmac into an ice rink and then it melted away like an apparition, leaving cold feet to stamp in the chilly puddles of slush. The funeral cortege had almost begun winding its way up the hill. The student gazed at this blazing and dark procession, as if it were a procession in the hereafter, in the early afternoon. He was gawping and marvelling at the sight of it all rather than mourning. The whole spectacle appeared so incredible. Three days previously Krisztina had fallen ill with pneumonia. Now she had quite simply been snatched away from him, swiftly and brutally, like when someone is blindfolded during the night, manhandled by an abductor, bundled into a coach and wakes up somewhere else in the morning. It left the student in a daze. He did not really believe in death. He listened to the melancholy singing, the lamentations in Latin and his thoughts drifted to his afternoon tea with cocoa. The masons sealed up the crypt. They slapped thin mortar on the fresh bricks. Then he came down the hillside alone. He let his arms swing by his side. He was thinking about the girl. Whimpering a little inside. Once again the sense of disbelief seized him with painful vehemence. He was looking for Krisztina and she – oh yes – she was no more.

But later on he wept. He collapsed on to the little table, which stood in front of the opaque window and convulsed with bitter sobs. He did not even undress at night. For three days he hardly slept. The minutes, hours and days passed by in a blur for him. When light peeped in through the shutters he did not know whether it was dawn or dusk.
“If only she would come back!” he sobbed into his pillow.
Towards spring he calmed down slightly. But his face became even more deathly pale. Now he could not even weep any longer and his tears flowed inwardly. This subsided grief of his only made him appear more dreadful, however. Those who saw him fell involuntarily silent.
“If only she would come back!” he sighed to himself.
In the evening he would lay out her clothes, her shoes and the yellow scarf which she could wind around her neck so daintily. He would imagine that she was sitting next to him. By the fireside, or on the chair or on the floor, her delicate, slightly freckled face turned towards the red warmth. Many times he could see her on the bed as well. He could hear her voice. If the doorbell rang he would rush to the door and was astonished that it wasn’t her who had come. On such occasions he would withdraw into the room and picture every minute detail of the tryst in his mind’s eye. Krisztina would walk through the door. He would help her off with her coat and offer her a chair. The girl, however, would cling to his neck, nestling her head against his chest and laughing loudly. He would play like this with the girl right through until dawn, listening to her laughter, gazing into her eyes. After these agonising and lethal embraces he would wake up the next morning with an ashen face and a bitter taste in his mouth.
Every day he would also go to the cabaret. He would look for her on the seedy little stage amongst the coloured footlights and would fail to find her. He would wait until midnight and then head homeward. At home he could not settle down. To his alarm, he realised that time was not the great healer for him. The girl was becoming ever more beautiful. Through the veil of the years her freckles shone at him, fair and charming, these sweet, erotic little speckles. Her mouth glittered like an enormous ruby and he could even taste the warm moisture of her silver saliva.
“If only she would come back!”
This sigh lingered within him like a sacred desire, the distilled essence of regret and mourning. He did not want to renounce it. He would have given his life if he could glimpse her – just for a moment. In his mind, he separated that moment into a million parts and felt as if in that moment he had experienced ecstasy’s every conceivable nuance. From day to day his desire grew more obsequious. He thought that if only he could see her coffin just once and could take a fearful glance through the glass, or if he could catch sight of the shadow of her dress in the mirror without ascertaining for certain whether it was made of clouds or lace. For such a moment he would have walked for years, without so much as a hat to protect his head and with bare feet bleeding. When in company, when good spirits tumbled exuberantly, in the middle of a dance this thought often sent shivers down his spine. His attempts to flee from it were futile. It stalked him. The student quietly surrendered. He wasted away into the shade of the deceased. Pale and gaunt he yearned for her to come back in the moonlight. He spoke without emotion. He dressed coldly and lustrously. On his breast, like the white slab of stone on the crypt, the immaculate shirt-front was always to be seen, gleaming, glinting and whoever set eyes on it thought of a corpse, of a girl, of the sorrowful head of a girl, who was palely slumbering beneath dreaming her unknown dream.
“If only she would come back!” his heart quivered.
His face said the same. Suffering etched its way into this soft countenance of wax. Even with the passing years it still mirrored the initial terror and alarm that had set rigid upon it and became hard as stone and cold as a death mask.

But one day Krisztina did come back.

After a bout of pagan revelry the student went home one torrid May afternoon.
Along the Boulevard the acacias deliriously poured out their heat. They protruded out of the asphalt, swayed and stretched and screamed their overpowering, resounding fragrance towards the heavens.
The student felt faint in this cacophonous riot of perfume. His stomach churned. Far away in a corner of the sky coiled sulphurous wisps of cloud, obscure lights, like when somebody plays with a mirror in the dark. He went onwards in the direction of his flat.
The maid met him in the hallway: “You have a visitor”.
“Who is it?”
“A young lady”.
Vidor Tass was astonished and could not think who might be seeking out his company because he had not received a female visitor since Krisztina’s death.
He opened the door to the room.
The girl was sitting on the bed. The yellow scarf around her neck. Her expression was placid, almost cheerful.
“Krisztina,” he said softly.
“Darling,” said the girl and caressed him. The student was not remotely surprised. He looked for a match and lit two candles. Now he could see Krisztina clearly. Death had definitely done her good. She was far healthier than she had been when alive. She had even put on a little weight in the coffin. But she was elegant, fresh as a daisy. Her white dress was the same one she had been buried in and it gently snuggled up to her face. It really suited her. Its fringe was slightly tattered, here and there it was decorated with green blossoms of mould, but it was barely perceptible, down the sides it sparkled the diamond of the grave, saltpetre. She reached out her hand to him.
“Look, my ring”.
“The old ring”.
The student looked at her inquiringly nevertheless.
“Don’t ask any questions,” the girl said in a choking voice, “I’m here, you can see me after all, fresh and resplendent. Don’t think of the short stories by Viktor Cholnoky in which ghosts come back from the dead. I am neither a spirit nor a spectre. But I don’t have time for idle chatter. I can only stay with you for thirty minutes. Then I have to go back. Take out your watch. It is now three o’clock. At half past three I will no longer be here”.
“Only thirty minutes,” sighed the student with feigned pathos.
The girl was slightly offended by this.
“Don’t put on an act, darling,” she said, “Every minute is worth its weight in gold”.
“A thousand pieces of gold!” cried the student, “Your kiss…your kiss…is worth a thousand times more…”
“You have been calling out for me every day for eight years. Now your wish has come true. What is your heart’s desire?”
Krisztina opened her arms and her lips cleft in two, red and fresh, as she awaited his kiss in a swoon.
The student kissed her.
Afterwards they sat opposite each other.
The student on the tabouret, the girl on the couch. They gazed at each other for a short while. But it was as if they had been disappointed by the kiss. They grew sad and the student hung his head. This, then, was the encounter he had so ardently dreamt about. What a reuniting. It seemed as if it had come somewhat abruptly. What was he to do now? Silence descended on the room, his heart was pounding, the hands of the watch crept forward. Only five minutes had gone by. Twenty-five minutes remained. The time seemed to stretch ahead interminably. The silence became more and more awkward.
The student coughed.
“How are you?” he asked, “That is to say, what’s new?”
The girl goggled at him, eyes wide. After all it did constitute an indiscretion to make such an inquiry of a dead person.
“Shall I put the kettle on?” he asked quickly.
“No, thank you”.
“Did you,” he gabbled “that little Herman has got married? Three years ago already. They even have a child. A strong, healthy little boy”.
“How interesting,” the girl replied in a bored voice.
“A lot has happened in the meantime. My Father died of stomach cancer. He suffered a great deal, the poor fellow”.
“How interesting”.
“You’re not interested? Since then I have obtained my medical degree. Next year I’ll be opening a surgery and I’ll be buying a flat in the neighbourhood. With three bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, kitchen and electric lighting”.
“How interesting”.
“Nusi was a flop on the stage”.
“How interesting”.
”But Ili has been a runaway success. The audiences are crazy for her”.
“How interesting”.
The student felt a cramp in his throat. He sneaked a look at the watch and noticed that a mere seven minutes had elapsed since the girl’s arrival. He fumbled for words in deadly embarrassment. Every minute seemed like an eternity. First of all he wanted to say something cheerful, then something very serious and doleful, but he did not deem either option appropriate and so preferred to keep silent. Krisztina sat on the sofa with downcast eyes and stared at the pattern in the carpet.
In the meantime it started raining.
“It’s raining,” said the student quietly.
“Yes,” replied the girl.
“It was a nice day yesterday, though”.
“Yes”.
“What a storm”.
“Yes”.
He had a sudden flash of inspiration.
“Are you not cold in that thin dress?”
“No,” laughed the girl.
Another few words, another strained effort and they suddenly fell silent.
They both stared into space. The student got up as if he wanted to extricate himself from the embarrassing situation. Still only nine minutes had ticked by. Krisztina leaned back on the couch. The student stood by the window. Then something dreadful happened. The girl felt as if her jaws had clamped, she would have liked to have yelled aloud how fed up she was and run, run out of this room. She struggled against it in vain. Her ligaments tore open her mouth and she, like a little automaton, and – this was not a trick of the light – , gave a wide, healthy yawn. She yawned once. She yawned twice. She yawned a third time. Then she picked up her umbrella from the table and made her way to the door. Perhaps she still wanted to say something, but when she reached the handle, she was again overwhelmed with the desire to yawn and she disappeared from the room without uttering a word.
The student found himself alone again. He felt a sense of relief, of release. He drummed his fingers on the table for a while. He looked at the street, the umbrella, the storm and the streaming window panes. He shrugged his shoulders. He too yawned. He looked at his pocket watch. It was ten past three.
They could still have had a whole twenty minutes together.

Translation copyright © Chameleon 2006. May not be reproduced in full or in part without express prior permission.

Like a leech on the underside of a leaf’s curl
Or an assailant in the alleyway, footsteps quickening,
Love, unbidden, seizes its victim.

I can’t walk past a florist’s at the moment without my Muse jabbing me in the ribs, pestering me to buy her a single stem rose (colour immaterial). I can’t sit in a cafe in peace and quiet either: no matter how incongruous a couple we make, she with shining tresses tumbling wildly over her shoulders, fancy-dress get-up, never a goosebump no matter how chill the not-quite-spring breeze and I the short one, camouflaging years of overindulgence with black outfits a size or two too generous – not that the casual observer tends to notice me in her company – the sellers with their wilted blooms smell blood. I sigh and fumble for my purse (a delaying tactic that fails miserably, although I never quite abandon hope) all so that she can sit and pull the petals off surreptitiously when I excuse myself, one by one, muttering the words she thinks I cannot guess. I should let her loose on the lawn, her obsession would certainly prove more environmentally friendly than weed killer, although I feel a certain sympathy with the daisies, forever turning their heads to follow the object of their longing. She still scowls at me behind my back, I caught a glimpse of her hostility in the mirror. I left her staring out the window contemplating the car parked beneath the cherry tree, blossom clinging to its windscreen wipers, decorating the bonnet like a mad scatter of confetti. In the attic, I opened the wardrobe to survey my old gowns, sequins and purple, a hint of stale perfume, preserved on their hangers, the ghosts of past selves. His seat empty, his spectacles folded.

My Muse sits gagged and bound in the corner, her eyes flashing contempt at my insolence, her divine tresses in an unaccustomed state of dishevelment. I couldn’t help it, I had to restrain her, stern measures were called for. I caught her standing in front of the mirror (always a bad sign, the frown as she caught sight of me a dead giveaway), a chaos of lipstick and mascara, superfluous powders and creams to smear over her unwrinkled brow. No creases or folds of extraneous flesh, her unchanging figure always displayed to perfection. Her fingertips trailing blossom, she would have wrapped herself around him like a sudden tendril of convolvulus. I suspect it had something to do with her raking through my photographs, ransacking my hidden images of his irreverence. Her tastes too often coincide with mine for comfort, she cannot resist his charms. She whirled wildly in abandon, casting her sandals into the undergrowth, distracting the swifts from their boisterous gathering of insects. Her sides heaved like the flanks of a hunting dog after the pursuit. She danced until her feet blistered, my entreaties finally coaxing her homeward. As she flopped, exhausted, on the bed, I knew her fatigue would not last. I drew the curtains to encourage her to sleep, biding my time until I spotted the dribble on the pillow case that had trickled from her imperishable mouth. Those devouring lips kindled my envy; it was all I could do not to suffocate her. I loosened her waistband, slipping the cords around her wrists, pausing as she let out a sigh of bliss. Her consuming flame would have singed his beard, her hungry caresses held him back. Now she too can discover what it is to suffer the sublime torture of his absence.

19th November 2004

I knew he was there. It stirred me from my sleep. Inevitable, like the glinting demons at the top of the stairs, banished by the imperious gaze of the unshaded bulb, but only as far as the shadows’ menace; inevitable, like the scissor man who would cut off the dangling hands of careless children from his dusty lair beneath the bed. I knew he could see me through the crack between the curtains: only the lace and the glass and the ebbing strength of my will separated us.

He never smiled, my evening lover, his breath convolvulus and ivy, tendrils and gloss, his saliva the sweet downstream decay of a drowned sheep snagged in the branches to swell, his hands damp lichen and bracket fungus, his eyes the dark of a clearing in the pine on a cloudless winter night. He did not startle me. I must grip the handle, lift, pull and let the wind billow, caressing my hair, my long hair tangled for him at his silent command. And all love is a draining and a taking, so why do I complain? I, who am well-used by my visitor, He who calls into my dreams from the smooth tiles of the balcony, who grins in the cat’s rooftop stretch and the dog’s febrile yap. He cools my longings, just a bruise, a bruise and an incision. Draped couches and snaking women with droplet emerald adornments whose nails will scrape away my skin. Sometimes he begs my forgiveness when I am weak for failing to cure me. He is the soil in which I am laid to rest, the satin lining to sup on my fluids, the comforting nectar concealed in his embrace.

14th November 2004

“Weather-speak can be used:
as a simple greeting
as an ice-breaker leading to conversation on other matters
as a ‘default’, ‘filler’ or ‘displacement’ subject, when conversation on other matters falters, and there is an awkward or uncomfortable lull”
Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour

“You must never be anything other than ‘common’. You must never reveal you are in possession of an intellect, even amongst fellow students (‘cult of the moron’). Women are empty-headed, or at least they have to act stupid. They are always subordinate to men, regardless of status. If they appear in public alone, they are treated as sex objects. It is inadvisable for a woman to enter a pub unaccompanied, or even with a female friend – after a few minutes, some randy beer-breath will inevitably sidle up to her in an attempt to chat her up (referring to her as ‘hen’ in P and ‘doll’ in Glasgow). If she refuses to submit to his advances, he will retreat, never with dignity, muttering sourly that she is a lesbian or (paradoxically) a slag”
Diary entry from 1990 on Scottish etiquette.

His raspberry laughter arched her back,
Delivered her, shrieking at her fate.

Memories cling to the walls, like nicotine stains, banished under a coat of fresh paint; a great, gaping numbness, a tingle in the limbs – there is no world without desire. If only I could dissolve in the crowd of painted faces, dyed wigs; the knot of roots, the grass beneath the pines; sugar dissolving at the bottom of the cup, orange liquid: there is nothing that cannot be healed by tea, pull the strings and squeeze out the last drops.

Years before the disabled war veterans’ trust ripped out the black wooden doors to replace them with the current (double-glazed) frosted panels, which do not permit the occupant to conceal his approach, all too flimsy a protection against the prying eyes of unwanted evangelists, my brother and I would spy on the comings and goings next door through the letterbox, kneeling on the mat or perched on stools. The milkman would be followed by the postie (we always plotted to snatch the letters from his fingers as he pushed them through, though we never dared) and maybe a separate van delivery with a parcel from the catalogue.
For all our zeal, our efforts at prying were feeble in comparison to those of the twin sisters in the ground floor flat opposite, known to us only by our cruel nickname for them, the Slobs, true professionals in the art of casual observation, who squeezed their generous bulk into identical pink pinnies, stretching the nylon taut. The only way to distinguish between them was the colour of their spectacle frames, their unkempt hair dangled in greasy, strands to just below their lobes, flaps of loose flesh hung sullenly from their upper arms. In dull weather they would prop themselves for hours on their window sills, one in the living-room, one in the bedroom (net curtains had not yet become fashionable, so it was possible to peer into the depths of the neighbouring dwellings). In summer, they would sit side by side on deckchairs on the front doorstep, handkerchiefs protecting their scalps, their constant attentiveness the perfect deterrent to burglars. They even dried their washing in full view of the street on a clothes horse in preference to using the line on the back green rather than miss a single snatch of conversation or passer-by.

One of the newcomers in the flat above them filled me with dread. Henry Bayne (“the bane of my life”), whose jutting brow left his sunken eyes in permanent shadow. Only I could discern the sly, predatory glint in them whenever he caught sight of my awkwardly blossoming body, his unblinking gaze never fooled by the combat jacket or the camouflage trousers I attempted to conceal it in. Every weekday morning in his unvarying garb of flat cap and trench coat, he would clamber into the back of the ambulance, which ferried him up to the psychiatric hospital for occupational therapy. Upon returning in the afternoon, he would lean on the gate, greedily sucking in smoke from his cigarette, shopping bag suspended from the crook of his arm, watching the schoolgirls run by in their plaited skirts, white socks and blazers. His sister took care of him until she could cope no longer, cowering under the bed to escape the persecution of a mysterious light that relentlessly chased her round the room.

My loathing for Henry was instinctive and I took refuge in my room whenever the doorbell rang, knowing that he had come sniffing for me. Everyone knew my Father was a nurse and that they could turn to him for friendly advice on minor medical matters. Henry would furnish him with constant updates on the state of his gastrointestinal tract: “Ma bowels huv’nae moved the day” (although further south such intimacy would constitute an irreparable breach of decorum, in Scotland allusions to bodily functions – or, more accurately, malfunctions – ailments and recent deaths lubricate social interaction in exactly the same way as chatting about sunny spells and cold snaps does in England). Having received my Father’s reassurances, he would have no choice but to withdraw down the gravel path. The whine of the gate’s metal hinges signalled that it was safe to emerge.

I always insisted that my parents lock the doors behind them so that he could never sneak in whilst I was watching TV. If he tapped at the kitchen window I would pretend not to be in, although he never tested the handle. Once, however, I answered the chime when alone in the house. His grin reminded me of the slash of a knife as he grabbed me by the wrist, thick, nicotine-yellowed nails like talons digging into my skin. Pushing his way over the threshold, he announced: “You’re mine now. I’m going tae tell yer Mother that you’ll have tae marry me”. No matter how hard I pulled I could not release myself from his grip. To my great relief, I heard my Mother’s car pulling into the driveway.

The incident haunted me for months. Henry had been the only male to evince any less than pure interest in me. Was I cursed? Condemned to captivate damaged souls brimful with despair? Gy’s self-pitying “Why do I always attract deranged women?” now echoes in my mind. With him, the imputation of pathological imbalance was a tactic of absolution, permitting him to slough off his share of the responsibility. My inexperience rendered me helpless, a plight exacerbated by my faith: the Church condemned me to passivity, God would determine whether, when and by whom my hymen would be pierced, in the meantime His will be done.

[To Neal, 5th August 1997]

“ég és föld között,
van és nincs között,
van és lehet között”
(Balla D. Károly: “Három Másodpercem”).

Hovering (lebegő).

Flying over the sloping rooftops, the dark chimneys, the bridges, the empty bridges and the telephone cables, white head lamps, red tail-lights, ceaseless motion – the Angel of Death, swooping silently to climb through a window, candle guttering, gripping the shoulder of the frail and dismayed, the fullest-hearted, cold spreading downwards as you gaze into the blackness of the sockets and you cannot escape, paralyzed. Downwards, downwards, like a predatory owl after its fill. Quietly ascending again to the star-sprinkled void. An ambulance siren, a certificate and the relatives inconsolable.

Van és lehet között. Heat, a trickle of sweat, discarded blankets and duvets slumped over an armchair – open window, trams from the street – laughter – walking, neon, sitting in the room with the lights off. One trickle of sweat, down behind the ear, brushing back your hair and I can’t see you. The fridge hums and the bottle too perspires when you remove it. A million people here, millions there, millions breathing, eating, but only one matters. How can there be so many of them when only one matters? Wiping your palm on a cushion. Even with the window wide, no relief. Moths intrude, captivated, dusty wings spreading against the wall, seeking camouflage. Gazing, gazing upwards, a smile, a blank ceiling. Nothing and no-one matters, only this proximity.

Van és lehet között. Restlessness. Not having arrived, uncertainty and certainty. Waiting, waiting. Hours, days, weeks.

N. Miniature cable car along the edge of the cliff, travelling just above the treetops like in a dream when all you have to do is will it and there you are, out of reach but not too close to the sun who would melt you in your pride. The river winds away towards Dinant. Early darkness. Wave to the children as you pass above the playground, climb out quickly on arrival and walk for a while through the car park.

All of this existence you carry with you in your mind, the senses speak ceaselessly. This water is cool, drink it. This tea is bitter, be polite and swallow it down. The language that lets you identify, the language that becomes mute. Narrowing, a proximity that absorbs, envelops, a silence, a touch, blue veins, pores, dampness. This whole world that spins and we don’t even notice, too enclosed in our own flesh. A lingering scent on a pillow. Sleep, senselessness.

Evening silence.

Double cappuccino by the bus-stop. Sparrows drinking from the puddles, squabbling over the contents of an iron mesh bin. I broke a washing machine today, imagine! The university’s insurance should cover it. I had to finish my washing by hand and spin it, all of which took up the time I had intended for this letter. On Friday, the last day. Saturday morning, packing, back through the town to the railway station and Kolozsvár with Enikő. Strange, this in-betweenness, this neither-here-nor-thereness, this thirst and longing. The acorns are falling onto the concrete paths, the students preparing for tomorrow’s exam. On the way to Tokaj, in Nagy Gábor’s bus, as I told you, we were half-dozing. The weather had cleared after pouring down in the morning (surprise, surprise!). He didn’t get lost this time, but drove too fast, overtaking too aggressively. Then, without warning, an explosion beneath us, the bus listing to one side, then again, skidding, scraping along the surface. Stopping slowly, shuddering. Broken axle, we thought. Two blown out tyres and we had to exit carefully so that the bus would not tip over into the ditch with us in it. Laughing by the roadside, mobile ‘phone call to find a replacement, a free glass or two of Tokaj’s best as compensation for the inconvenience.

I have a vivid image of you standing opposite the bus in the car park in Eger, sunglasses on. And of you inside the cathedral, as we all half-attempted to be discreet walking along the aisles, tutting at the bride’s bottled-red locks. I did not light a candle in Eger in the church. Usually I do, purely to appease, perhaps to show gratitude. The smell of wax, the smell of churches. Solemn images of the Virgin, serene, unfidgeting child.

Once, in “Cafe Hawelka” in Vienna, my pale features accentuated by my black velvet cloak, I wrote a poem in German for a young man at a nearby table. As I went to the toilet (a pretext), I discretely passed it to him. When I returned to my seat, he smiled, but I was not alone. I would feed you with ice-cream in Vienna and we could go on the big wheel, the Riesenrad, in Prater. Vienna was my first experience of Central Europe. Now I wonder, what is Croatia like? I saw it on the news tonight. A crowd cheering and a church draped with flags. Asserting nationhood.

I ache to see you.

I detest heights, so going on the Riesenrad is an act of masochism. It stops when you are suspended at the highest point and you can survey the city with the help of the indicators. Vienna, melange and dainty glasses of water. Athena with her golden helmet in front of the Parliament. Schottenkirche. Grinzinger Friedhof. Gustav Mahler – roses and irises freshly cut to wither in mourning.

The litter-strewn pavements of the metropolis are choked with shoppers, doorways temporarily sheltering woollen-hooded figures on cardboard mattresses. Bogus or real? The throb of traffic, jutting elbows with windows rolled down, cigarette ends, mass-produced sandwiches tightly packed on refrigerator shelves. A woman, face down in the gutter, motionless as the passers-by pick their way around her, tutting in disapproval. A girl walking home from the fair gunned down at random. No more candy floss, toffee apples or cuddly tigers won from the stall. A schoolboy’s stubbleless cheek permanently gashed from an unprovoked knife attack. Gnarl-handed women propped up on hospital pillows and dispatched against their will with unauthorised overdoses of morphine. Routine callousness – only contributors to the economy deserve respect. Cameras tracking from the pigeon-infested ledges, speeding, shoving, vomiting, shoplifting. The false informality of transactions, empty greetings.

A police clampdown on urination in the streets exploits the “ridicule factor” as a deterrent. Patrolling officers present offenders with a bottle of disinfectant (a length of tube attached to direct the spray more effectively) and a brush, ordering them to clean up in front of their friends. If their protests become too foul-mouthed they are arrested. In the semi-privacy of an orange-bathed alleyway, a youth unrepentantly deposits his scent on the brick wall of a supermarket, mobile in one hand, plumbing in the other.

An insurance company report reveals that window-cleaning is the profession that poses the greatest threat to life and limb in Britain today, being a member of the armed forces coming second and upholding law and order sixth. A sad indictment perhaps of safety standards in the underbidding culture encouraged by tight spending margins, or a slight reassurance that perhaps our pervasive sense of gloom is exaggerated after all.

In the recesses of the subconscious, the flea-ridden strays snarl, baring their teeth in anticipation.

“You look like an angel,
Sleeping it off at a station,
Were you only passing through?”
Kate Bush, ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’

[To Gy, August 1997]

Today’s lecture was about Nádas, more specifically ‘Emlékíratok könyve’. According to the teacher, one of the main themes in Nádas is that the world has fallen apart (szétesett) and this is reflected in the plight of the individual. We are constantly expected to play a bewildering number of roles, donning a series of masks depending on the situation we happen to find ourselves in, but masks are objects: strip the individual of the masks and there is nothing left underneath. We have all lost our centre, or, perhaps more properly, certainty. Directionless, searching for meaning. The eternal role-playing represents a substitute for a non-existent reality, a distraction from the internal vacuum. Reality is assumed to lurk beneath the surface, which provides a transcendental solution to the problem. The roles played by the individual do not constitute an identity, he claimed. I disagree. The roles DO constitute an identity, a social identity, with the self as the focal point for the processing of experience. Order, in the teacher’s interpretation of Nádas, can be found in beauty alone, in physical beauty because beauty is harmony. I also reject this argument. What matters in my opinion is moral beauty, the purity of emotions and the consistency that arises from following your convictions. Though I do not condone evil (you will retort, how can I define evil without a notion of morality?), conventional morality counts for very little. It is the product of social consensus and varies through time. It is relative, in other words. Physical beauty does not go beyond the surface and is transitory in a way that moral beauty is not. If you take physical beauty as the foundation of your image of yourself, as the prime motivator of your actions, you will devour yourself because it will fade with age (although I admit this is again the product of social attribution). I know how flimsy a consolation physical beauty is through experience: I possessed it once and lost it through becoming fat and invisible. As a result, I had to find an alternative, but even when I was beautiful it was never my primary concern. Purity of intent took precedence over all else. Which brings us back to my favourite topic of conversation at the moment: Neal. We have become increasingly obsessed with authenticity as a substitute for the lost centre/certainty. The irony with Neal is that, to attain the authenticity that will liberate him, to free himself of the hypocrisy which his birth has imposed upon him he has to undergo a transformation, a metamorphosis from falsehood to truth, a rebirth allowing him to live at last.

Another theme from Nádas is that of violence. As he makes explicit in one of his short stories (‘A bárány’), even the act of redemption involves violence, through sacrifice and bloodshed. In ‘Egy családregény vége’ one of the main characters, the Jewish grandfather, states that the only route to happiness (itself the sole worthwhile aim of human existence) is to be completely passive. I would counter that passivity leads to frustration and destruction (the female plight). Most religions echo the grandfather’s views by exhorting the adherents to abandon desires, to renounce the self, as the self’s ceaseless promptings of desire blight our existence, or, to quote Schopenhauer: “Alles Wollen springt aus Bedürfnis, also aus Mangel, also aus Leiden. Diesem macht die Erfüllung ein Ende; jedoch gegen einen Wunsch, der erfüllt wird, bleiben wenigstens zehn versagt: ferner, das Begehren dauert lange, die Forderungen gehn ins Unendliche; die Erfüllung ist kurz und kärglich gemessen. Sogar aber ist die endliche Befriedigung selbst nur scheinbar: der erfüllte Wunsch macht gleich einem neuen Platz: jener ist ein erkannter, dieser ein noch unerkannter Irrtum. […] Darum nun, solange unser Bewußtsein von unserem Willen erfüllt ist, solange wir dem Drange der Wünsche, mit seinem steten Hoffen und Fürchten, hingegeben sind, wird uns nimmermehr dauerndes Glück noch Ruhe”. However, the self is all that exists, therefore to renounce it is to condemn the individual to extinction and obscurity before the inevitable snuffing out which is physical death. Why yearn for it in advance? I am active. To an extent, we create our own happiness – to the extent, that is, that we do not depend on others for our happiness. The problem is, as the teacher pointed out, that if you chase happiness, it usually eludes you. Happiness is an athlete with incredible stamina. No matter how stubborn the pursuit, no matter how much of an adrenalin rush spurs you on, happiness remains just out of reach. I push harder and harder, raising the stakes until collapse is imminent. Brinksmanship. Then, in sheer exhaustion, I crumple, slump and weep, lamenting my lost life, bitter that, in spite of my best efforts, my honesty, my sincerity, my generosity, still I am abandoned. There is, however, no alternative. Standstill is not possible, only retrogression, stagnation, decay.

[To Gy, 29th July 1997]

When we were on the bus one of the things that distressed Neal was that he had to lie about his name, at least, it was a lie until he uttered it and from that moment on it became the truth because he was reborn “officially” as a man. He detests lying and to him, I suspect, his entire existence up to now (he would refuse to call it a life) has been one of massive falsehood because he was born into the wrong body, a vicious twist of fate that has condemned him to wretchedness until now. His choice challenges all our accepted (socially transmitted) ideas of what makes up reality and authenticity. To the outside world/society, the reality was that he was a woman and the physical reality could not be denied. Internally, though, the outlook was entirely different. He could not accept the tormenting, mocking gulf between the appearance and the reality. To him, the only way that he could truly be himself was to make the physical and the psychological/emotional match. I admire him because he seeks authenticity, taking the need for consistency to its logical conclusion. I empathise with this drive because one of the qualities I prize most in others, even more than simple honesty, is authenticity. Others might find his persona deeply disturbing. I do not, I want to possess it. He proves that our identities and categories for recognising others (and subsequently categorising them with the implicit value judgements the exercise entails) are not nearly as stable, solid or unambiguous as we would like to think.

[2004]

In the middle of the night Lydia called from Jakarta, near hysterical because of the severe turbulence she had experienced during the flight. He did his utmost to calm her, voice soft and melodic in his native tongue. Neal coveted a beard more than anything else. Every morning he would inspect his chin for stubble, rubbing his slender fingers over his cheeks. The testosterone injections left him drained and irritable. As he lay spread over the mattress in his striped pyjamas, arms flung wide I soothed him with fictions based on characters we had met. When she returned from her business trip, I was finally introduced to Lydia. Her tactic to disarm me was spontaneous generosity, presenting me with an opal on a leather thong, which she placed round my neck at the café. I could not warm to her in her artificial splendour: wig, false nails, eye shadow and foundation, cherry red lipstick, heels, short skirt, in short the primped ultra-femininity I have always eschewed. The heat and the wine, his brown locks and plump lips, my brow uncaressed, my womb burning.

[Diary Entry, 1997]

Crossing the tarmac at Munich airport, my heart sank at the sight of the Croatian Airlines ATR 42, even tinier than your average Sabena regional jet as well as being propeller-driven. I had never experienced this before, but had heard endless laments from colleagues about noise levels (which subsequently proved unfounded, though the vibration distorted conversation from the rows behind to the extent that even the snatches of conversation in Danish were rendered incomprehensible – nor would I recommend teeth-gritting as a fear-management strategy on this particular mode of transport). As I stepped out of the bus, I did a quick head count. Of the forty or so passengers, I was one of only three women. We had to board at the rear hatch, as the entrance at the front opened on to an unfitted, unupholstered space draped over with netting. Seat 9A. I let most of the others overtake me. A man in an ill-fitting polyester suit frantically dialled his mobile a few metres from the plane – one last call before take-off. At the top of the stairs I received my initiation into the Croatian language: pepeljara (ashtray) and izlaz (exit). The stewardesses were bemused by my grin.

Fasten seatbelts while seated: zavežite svoje pojaseve dok sjedite. Life vest under the seat: pojas za spašavanje je ispod Vašeg sjedišta. Ljeto for summer. A map in the in-flight magazine accompanied by the usual effusive commentary extolling the virtues of the home country (implicitly complimenting the reader on his discernment and good taste in selecting the destination of travel) informed me that Croatia has 4.8 million inhabitants. Jadransko More is the Adriatic, Crno More the Black Sea and Budimpešta my spiritual capital. The hostess roused me from my daydream, more vocabulary: osvjezovajući rupčić for refreshing tissue. Wiping the sweat from my palms, I gazed at a flotilla of hot-air balloons floating sedately over a lake. Mountains in the distance, the Alps. Vrhnje za kavu, cream for coffee. “Would you like a drink, maybe?” Then: “Would you like coffee, maybe?” She poured into the plastic cup a brew so vile that I was tempted (only tempted, mind you!) to retract my pet jibe about Sweden (the Swedes being so puritanical that one of the few vices they indulge in, the imbibing of a caffeine-based stimulant, is so bitter that any possible pleasure that may be extracted from the experience is immediately ruined, banished in favour of dull utilitarianism). Below us bare peaks (karge Höhen) stretched endlessly, pockets of snow on the flats, valleys gouged so deep that it seemed as if the benevolent rays of the sun could never penetrate them. A láthatárig. Za vašu sigurnost, for your safety. A delicately wrapped sliver of chocolate on a tray. Kras the brand name.

Zračna Luka Zagreb, its style reminiscent of Ferihegy 1. Tension. Should I enquire about declaring currency? Two luggage collection points. I had been the first through passport control. The doors beyond customs would slide tantalisingly apart to reveal a glimpse of the concourse. No sign of him. In fact, the airport seemed to be in semi-slumber, so few in number were those waiting for new arrivals. I remembered noticing my forlorn bag about to be loaded, ignominiously squashed between suitcases. Had my packing been careful enough to allow for this contingency? Would the cheese be safe or had it oozed its way out of the cling-film restraints to smear over my ankle-length velvet dress in a foul-smelling not quite removable mush? Restlessness chivvied me across to the trolleys just as the conveyor belt shuddered into motion, announced by the customary impatient beep. I had scanned the tri-lingual notices concerning travellers’ allowances. A single bottle of Drambuie could not possibly cause offence, although all the other passengers were heading for the exit via the “goods to declare” channel. I made my way towards the “nothing to declare” and a uniformed male officer challenged me in Croatian. When I failed to respond, he repeated: “Passport?” I obediently removed it from my wallet, which necessitated a lot of fumbling. Then I decided to elicit information to establish the veracity of a Hungarian newspaper article (about tourists being harassed by border guards over the import of foreign currency even when the amounts were not excessive and obviously intended as spending money) that had preoccupied me for a couple of weeks. In spite of speaking slowly and clearly (without that patronising, overdecibelled tone that monoglots adopt towards the “ignorant” foreigner) I failed to make myself understood. The officer called over a member of the ground staff. I addressed her in German, ascertaining from her reaction to my English that it would simplify matters greatly. In the course of the next two minutes I succeeded (inadvertently) in insulting them both. Instant mortal enemies! “This is not Former Yugoslavia,” intoned the officer with obvious disgust, “This Croatia! No Serbia!” Rather than justify my ignorance and dig an even deeper hole beneath my feet I withdrew, shamefaced.

I do not know how many times I had enacted the scene of the long-awaited arrival in my mind without expectation of anything other than certainty. That not only would I be able to gauge the situation from the reception, but that also I would know within myself. Even the subtlest invention cannot take account of every permutation. A small group leaned patiently on the railing to my right. Neal was not amongst them. I did not succumb to either panic or dismay, but took a deep breath and began to peer further along the corridors. Sure enough, there he was, almost exactly as he was when he had left me to bounded up the staircase in Debrecen. He had fleshed out slightly. I feigned relief to dispel any initial awkwardness. Burdened down, I could do nothing but feebly extend my hand. He took it, then kissed me on each cheek, exactly as he had done when we parted. Leading me towards the bar, he explained that a friend of his, Dika, was there. She was due to leave for Split at nine, would I mind if we stayed for a while? Dika was warm and cheerful with a kind face. Sipping mineral water I recounted the details of my journey to them. What were my impressions of Croatia? Airport bars with their hectic anonymity are not the best setting for identifying the unique. The radio blared out pop ditties from Split and three or four men in their early to mid thirties sang along tunelessly. I was surprised by how new and pristine it was, unlike the rundown, primitive facilities in Ferihegy 1 with its newsagents and beer over the counter arrangements. Here the ceiling undulated sensuously with polished cherry wood and halogen lamps provided bright but discreet illumination. Neal and Dika chatted in Croatian. I grinned. “What does boca mean?” “It means bottle”. Dika excused herself and bustled off. “How do you feel?” “Fine,” blandly. In the last week I had suppressed knowledge of the trip to the extent that it came almost as a surprise to me when I had to pack on the morning of departure. Contentment, well-being and excitement. None of which I would admit to in spoken words. To distract: “It is very confusing for us to see that the word for arrival is virtually identical to the word for departure: dolazak and odlazak, exactly the same letters, just with the first two swapped round”.

I was beginning to wonder what had happened to Dika when she returned. It transpired that she had been checking in. “Two people in front of me and I have to wait twenty minutes, ridiculous!” It was approaching eight thirty. We kept her company on her walk to the gate. Their fondness for each other glowed as they bade farewell. Though I too would have given her a peck on the cheek (Waffelian habits finally catching up with me!), I shook hands instead.

There was little to see in the darkness. Neal deposited my bag in the boot and we climbed aboard the bus. With his usual attentiveness, he folded my coat, placing it in the rack above the seat, positioning the laptop carefully on the seat across from us, resting his hand on it protectively. Only a handful of others were there. I persuaded him to open the present from Denmark. “I will put it in a special place when we get home”. I quizzed him about the two important things he has to do. He has taken a month’s unpaid leave in order to study for an important exam, which will enable him to join the Croatian Architect’s Association. Every day during my stay he intends to swot for at least four hours. Art, from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century, hundreds of pictures to be memorised along with the names of the artists and details of period, style and contents. Instant recollection, indispensable. Success will mean that he can establish his own practice, freeing himself from the grinding subjugation of toiling for another. Recognition, custom, improved salary (800 dollars a month at present). Then he must tour the offices to complete the paperwork that goes with changing his name. The operation itself will take place either in October or November.

When we arrived at the terminus, which, in its concrete heaviness squatted unapologetically like similar edifices across Central Europe, he wanted to know whether we should walk or take a tram. I had some excess energy and the evening air was balmy. We passed the meridian line, Neal dutifully hauling my bag. To our left, a compact rough-hewn miniature castle jarred out of context at the roadside. Neal did not make any effort to conceal his scorn. “I hate this building. It is stupid”. Far from being a stranded relic or ancient gatehouse, it was perfectly modern, a family dwelling, twee rather than pretentious. On our right, row upon row of blocks of flats, not excessively tall, but grey and unimaginative, parking areas thankfully sheltered by trees, slogans about young people and peace as well as inescapable advertisements relieving the monotony of otherwise blank smoothness. We veered off to a path beaten through the grass. “Now it is not far,” he reassured me. Motorway flyovers and pedestrian underpasses. Ahead three tower blocks that reminded me of the decaying wastelands of London or the vanishing high rise ghettoes of Glasgow, the austerity of deprivation. We took the lift, the door to which can only be unlocked by residents, to the third floor.

The hallway, dining area and kitchen are floored with mocha linoleum. A sparse, yet not spartan habitation. Living room, which doubles up as a bedroom. For some reason I had expected a balcony or at least some means of opening out on to the road for ventilation. Acceleration, deceleration, screeching of brakes, whine of wind resistance, blare of horns, starting up of engines. Day and night without ceasing, a tarmac landscape lit by spotlights arranged theatrically on constructions that reminded me of the surveillance towers on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall, or alternatively, huge masts of varying height with crows’ nests to accommodate the clusters of bulbs.

Bookshelves piled with magazines in Italian, a desk dominated by an Apple Macintosh and an anglepoise. A postcard of a bride pursuing a groom, both on bicycles, grimly determined that he should accept her offering of the bouquet, beside them a black and white image of a nun, a cross suspended above it from the lamp, a paperweight with glass flowers. Three posters: the Korean section of the 6th architectural biennale in Venice, a collection of drawings by Palladio and the Debrecen programme in all its glory. A wall unit comprising shelves, drawers and wardrobe space, practical rather than decorative, silver dolphins leaping exuberantly, books in Croatian, Italian and Hungarian, a sofa bed, parquet floor.

He began to spread a feast before me on the table, but I had no appetite. The meagre sandwich and slice of cake on the plane had more than satiated me. I, however, was anxious that he taste the cake I had made for him, to discover whether he liked the cheese. “You can marry,” he joked, “It is good”. Liebe geht durch den Magen. I forced myself to eat a banana and joined him in a glass of Drambuie. With childlike enthusiasm, he cut open the cheese and sliced it. Chaumes, Saint Albray. I sampled local ewe’s cheese, which did not appeal.

Afterwards, we withdrew into the living room to chat about Debrecen. He showed me his photographs of his Irish roommates and other friends. I churlishly corrected the grammatical errors in P’s letter. Then came O’s lament that she had not received enough attention, making her antipathy for Jenő very plain without specifying its cause. According to Neal, they probably had an affair last year. So Jenő’s motive for attending is to kick over the marital traces for a fortnight a year and indulge his craving for variety. A hedonist. Undeniably, in the few photographs where they appear together O’s expression is strained and forlorn, rigid with tension. Possessive was the adjective Neal applied to her. Selfishly, I felt no sympathy for having deprived her of his company that evening in Eger. In the same album there are pictures of him that reveal his humour and never dampened spirits. My favourite showed him reclining on a lawn beside a white statue of a gargantuan woman adopting an identical pose to heighten the contrast. We debated E. He had immediately noticed the attraction between her and J on the very first occasion they went out together. He is both observant and empathic. “I feel many things with many people,” as he himself puts it. Before I could draw similar conclusions about the internal dynamics of the group I had to overcome my own self-imposed inhibitions, to set aside my hostility, to dare to emerge from the chronic state of self-absorption and allow myself to be drawn into the society of friendship from the aloofness of rivalry.

I feel perfectly at ease in his company, liberated from the necessity to impress, from the anxiety of appeasement, of pleasing, of entertaining to distract from the blight of my perceived inadequacy. I stretched out over the bed as he retrieved a shoebox from the wall unit. His green eyes sparkled with amusement as he revealed the contents: hundreds of photographs that we could not go through without staying up all night. He decided to show me some pictures of how he used to be. A long-haired woman leaning against the parapet of a bridge in Venice, wearing sunglasses and hugging a handbag defensively. I did not recognise him. Indeed, for me, these captured moments of the past were like a faint echo borne on a sea breeze. They did not even resemble the individual I know. Then a much younger Nela, short, spiky hair, full lips and stiff pose, a radiant girl with long brown hair beside her. “She was my first love,” he sighed. A studio portrait, when he was aged eighteen. “You can see my whole inner life in my eyes. You can see how I was feeling and what I was thinking”. I had to agree. A slender and delicate figure, eyes brimful of pain, neither hostile nor resentful, but slightly wary, mistrustful, intelligent, aware, lost. Self-conscious, ill at ease, subdued. Back a couple of years, sitting on a beach in the sunshine, holding a small child, smooth, hairless legs, swimming costume. Then in a dimly lit living room, again with children. Quiet, contemplative, solemn, her beauty striking. The same short-cropped hair, a shirt unbuttoned at the collar, an almost fragile look about her, face pale, features fine. I could imagine her on a catwalk in Paris, modelling furs, her high cheekbones conveying an impression of cool arrogance, her eyes flashing with a contemptuous fire. Finally, a later image, together with two women, Nada, dressed in black, head to one side, looking directly into the lens and yet keeping her distance and Lydia, an attractive, vivacious, slim blonde, laughing. “These are the two most important people in my life,” he informed me. In flicking through one album, I learned more about Italy from his panorama shots than from a myriad of professional, glossy-paged volumes. By then I was exhausted and retreated into the bathroom with its peculiar mixture of razors, aftershaves, mud packs and skin creams.

In the morning he laid the table for breakfast, a daily ritual. As I lay beneath the duvet, the rich aroma of coffee roused me from half-slumber. He cut more of the cheese, urging me to eat some too. Afterwards he had to embark on the painstaking process of memorising dozens of illustrations from the many art books on his shelves. As he hunched over his desk, tying his hair back into a pony tail with a small navy blue band, I drifted back to sleep in the morning sunshine, much as had been my wont all those months ago in L.

We dined on soup and a pasta dish that he made before slowly gathering momentum to head for the centre. He insisted that I wear socks, but I refused, not realising that it would cool rapidly later on. We took the lift down and, stepping into the sunshine, I breathed deeply, ready to drink in my new surroundings. A newspaper stand was our initial port of call as Neal purchased tram tickets. Next door stands a kiosk with bunches of bananas hanging from hooks, apples displayed alongside nuts, soft drinks in bottles. We were flanked by the motorway on one side and high rises on the other with covered balconies and rows of socks, shirts and underwear dangling limply, young girls leaning idly on their silky elbows, staring silently at the passers-by. The pavement surface, such as it was, rose and fell abruptly, its unevenness a challenge to the roller-bladers who pirouetted around us. Old men sat on public benches in their black hats, bags of groceries nestling by their feet.

“I have no luck with the tram when I am with you,” Neal complained, “I never have to wait this long on my own”. In the end, we took a different one to normal, changing further down the line. A rotund beetle, camouflaged like a leaf, marched in diminishing circles across the surface of the pane. Horns blared as a fleet of cars festooned with streamers and balloons sped by. “I pity them,” Neal shook his head in dismay, “Because they are getting married”. We turned to pass a wall spray-painted in a variety of styles: an expressionistic train like a refugee from a 1920s exhibition in the Weimar Republic, a fading huddle of female figures in the idiom of Picasso, abstract geometric shapes leading up to the main station on King Tomislav Square. Opposite this, a park with ornamental flower beds, neat pathways and a museum. An anomalous Victorian bandstand, genteel fountain and busts atop columns. “Szálljunk le!” Neal instructed as we trundled into the main square, Trg Bana Jelacica, with its granits benches, elegant cafés and the dominating feature of the equestrian statue looking for all the world like a Hungarian hussar, though I did not dare to point this out.

It was not what I had anticipated. There was not the slightest trace of the war. Budapest, with her shrapnel-gouged granite and bullet-riddled sandstone bears the wounds of her past conflicts more visibly. I was struck by how new and pristine everything seemed to be. Smart shop fronts crammed full of Italian clothes, shoes, the customary neon incitements to buy insurance policies on the rooftops, no litter, no dust, no decay, simply a confident prosperity amidst a profusion of banks. Sleek modern trams in their blue and yellow livery rubbed shoulders with the older models. Popcorn stands and roast chestnuts in paper bags. We began a winding route towards the cathedral along a street lined with small businesses where cobbles were being laid. Leather goods, hats, training shoes. Neal would stop to scan the prices. His feet are growing and he needs a pair for walking. I enquired as to whether they were expensive in proportion to his salary. He does not mind about quality, merely practicality. We veered off so that he could show me a passageway. An alcoholic staggered, cursing incomprehensibly, out of the doorway of a night shop, laden down with bottles. “We do not have problems compared with these people,” Neal reminded me.

Dusk had drawn in almost imperceptibly. “I take you to old part now”. Gift shops and cafés had been built into the sagging plaster and brick constructions painted in cheerful primary colours. An ancient sundial protruded from a wall, the sign at the entrance to the bar beneath it reproducing it in miniature. Although the temperature was pleasant, few customers lounged in the wicker chairs with their gaudy cushions. Neal explained that it was too early for the crowds. The end of the season, autumn’s chill. We turned right and upwards. An armed policeman chattered into his radio. When I asked Neal about the poetry covering the walls, he shrugged dismissively: “It is about war, it is not interesting,” before ushering me through the wrought iron gates. Children played, darting in and out between the forlorn wooden stalls of the market. The pavements were wet, having been recently hosed down to dissipate the smell of rotting leaves and squashed fruit. A memory of Kolozsvár, stacks of eggs in cardboard, red and green paprikas, grapes and peasant headscarves strayed through my mind. Leaving the side street I listened to Neal’s rendition of a conversation we had overheard. A man seeking advice about shirts.

In front of us a pillar, gold leaf covered angels gazing heavenward about the base, a Madonna surveying the city, resplendent in her flowing, opulent robes, arms outstretched compassionately. The cathedral of Sv. Stjepan majestically floodlit before us, partly clad in scaffolding, the attire of restoration. Its hollow spires reminded me of its counterpart in S, though here the scale is smaller, the decoration more austere. Much of the sculpture has been dismounted, the masonry crumbled. Angels and saints with worn faces knelt in an attitude of supplication behind a protective fence. Atmospheric pollution had taken its toll over the centuries. Inside, worshippers bowed their heads in contemplation, scattered amongst the pews. The ceiling between the vaults was painted the same serene shade of blue as the cloudless evening sky, dotted with stars. Neal crossed himself respectfully with holy water, genuflecting to the altar. Memorials to the interred nobility cluttered the walls with their Latin inscriptions and, in the shadow of the central image of the Virgin and Child, a coffin with panels of beaten silver and gold and a portrait of the face if the bishop who rests within. A carved allegory of the church as a maiden with sword caught my eye with its unassuming portrayal of feminine strength and dignity. “If I could steal one object from the cathedral that would be it” I smiled at Neal. Nearing the end of our tour, I was intrigued by strange lettering behind a crucifixion scene. Old Croatian, which Neal was unable to decipher, a translation provided. Just as we reached the exit, the bells began to peal in sombre tone and a man drew down the heavy iron bars to bolt us in. My obvious discomfort at the imminent prospect of guesting in the House of the Almighty was a source of mischievous amusement to Neal who pretended that he had not understood how we were to leave the building.

Back down towards our point of departure, cutting across a street parallel to the main square. Again we arrived at the street where cobbles were being laid with its disarray of warning tape and fine gravel. Our initial effort to ascend a narrow passageway was thwarted by a stream of men in jackets and bow ties accompanied by a bright throng of women in suits and their best jewellery, chatting animatedly. Neal beckoned to me to follow. The restaurants of Zagreb would have no end of trade that evening, as it seemed that half of the fertile population had chosen that particular day to tie the knot. The flow of celebrants was endless. By now, the last traces of orange were fading from the horizon. For illumination, we depended on harsh white lamps in square boxes resting on barley sugar twist legs. “Come with me!” Neal motioned to an entrance a few metres ahead. “Pod grickim topom”, an establishment with an outdoor section on a wooden platform affording an excellent view of the capital. He recommended it to me.

After that minor detour, we continued up the final stretch of the path. A funicular railway, a dwarf in comparison with its counterpart in Budapest, fell away below us. To our rear, a compact white tower with a smaller round metal structure on its roof like the lantern room that sends out its friendly beam, guiding imperilled ships beyond the hungry rocks.

[To Gy, 28th July, 1997]

The trip to Eger proved fairly eventful, as I shall now record for posterity (posterior? Bog roll?). Amusingly, on the tour of the vár we were expected to file down a narrow passageway to look at …a well. A fairly deep one at that. Conveniently (and to avoid being sued no doubt) it had been covered with an iron mesh, similar to the one that could be seen if you looked upwards, although the latter was much finer so that the coins that had been thrown would be caught. I wonder if that made the wishes invalid too? Anyway, rain stopped play. We couldn’t go on the tour by train to the specialist wine cellars, so had to return to the town in the afternoon.

I have become a member of the “csapadék csoport” [“The reason we call ourselves the csapadék csoport is that here the weather might have been blazing sunshine the whole week, but, come Saturday, excursion day, the heavens open and do their worst. According to the forecast, tomorrow will be no exception. We clustered together for shelter around the few who had had foresight enough to bring umbrellas. Hence our slogan: ‘Csapadék is falling down’”], half beginners and half advanced/native speaker level along with a Croatian, Nela. You doubtless know enough about the grammatical niceties of Slavic languages to realise that this is a female name. I, with characteristic aplomb, did not bother to inspect this person’s badge and was convinced it was a man. At the beginning of the second week the others had to pick my jaw up off the ground when they informed me he wasn’t. I hadn’t paid overmuch attention to him until that point, but I was so convinced of being right that I started looking more closely. Ample covering of arm hair, lack of visible breasts, muscular shoulders, etc. He had always been flirtatious towards me. The outing to Eger was the last meeting of the csapadék csoport, since more than half the students stay only for the first fortnight. It was Nela’s last evening in Hungary too, the evening when Nela ceased to be and Neal was born.

On the previous excursion to Hortobágy I had shared a table with him (I deliberately refer to him in the masculine not simply out of deference, but because as far as I am concerned he is already male prior to surgical reassignment). As we devoured the cold cherry soup starter he expressed his amazement at my grasp of Hungarian, but I never really spoke to him beyond that brief exchange. I have been something of a recluse, seldom mingling, always in the library or reading in my room. In Eger, though, he sat opposite me at lunch and next to me at dinner. As the wine flowed and the violinists’ playing became more exuberant our conversation began in earnest. “When I saw the queue for the toilets there were so many women waiting that I decided to go to the men’s instead. You know, at the moment, I am in the middle, sometimes one, sometimes the other. When I go to the ladies’ toilet in Croatia they shout at me, this is the ladies’ and when I go to the men’s they throw me out, saying it is only for men. I am stuck in between, you know”. He is an architect in Zagreb and has enough of a sense of humour to take my feeble quip about it being a booming trade after the conflict in good part. Then we broached the subject of astrology: “So, you are a Lion. You like warmth, you like to dominate, you always want to be perfect, but you are very sensitive underneath. You are very intelligent and you feel no-one understands you. Few people do understand you because you are special, you are not like them. And now, I tell you what I feel, not what I think I should say. You have an inner enemy that you must beat. You must be stronger than that inner enemy and you must win. You do not have (here he had to lean over to consult Jasna, another Croatian member of the csapadék csoport) enough self-respect and that is bad. You see, I know you, I understand you very well”.

Throughout the meal, he shared bread with me, and when he cadged an unwanted piece from someone (I thought he just had a sweet tooth), he halved it with me, though my piece was bigger and had the sweet topping. I remembered that one day at the büfé during break he had slipped me a Milky Way bar, which on that particular moment had been just what I needed, perking me up for the rest of the morning. Then he told me that he is a transsexual, mid-way through his treatment, neither a woman nor yet properly a man, going through puberty again. His voice is dropping and can indeed sometimes be very deep. The riot of hormones means he has an almost unlimited appetite for sweets and has to drink plenty of milk and eat cheese. All that he has left to complete the process is to undergo the final operation, the dangerous part. It will cost between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars. “It might also end up being erect all the time,” he laughed, to which I replied that surely no-one would find that a problem (allzeit bereit). Suddenly he remarked “Look!” and the room was completely empty. Literally everyone else had gone away. There had been some 250 of us crowded around only minutes before and I had not even noticed they had left. We walked out to the bus. He seemed slightly nervous and wanted to take a seat next to me. “Have I shocked you, F? I am worried I have shocked you”. I did not reply, except to smile and put my arm beneath his, taking his hand and inclining towards him. This is how we sat for the remainder of the drive back. We talked about my insufferable room-mate [we only shared toilet, shower and wash-basin facilities, the bedrooms self-contained]. The woman drives me to distraction with her attention-seeking coughing, gargling and humming. By quoting Orson Welles playing Harry Lime on the achievements of her native land [“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”] I caused the latent hostility between us to surface. “She chases you because she does not understand you, and the more she chases you, the more you push her away. You see, I do understand you,” he cooed.

Opposite us (we were at the front: “It’s better here, I will look after you, you will see”) sat a sweet couple, a Hungarian woman who had been married to a Serb and her second husband, an Austrian. They recognized me from the newspaper article. We struck up a camaraderie around the fact that her husband and myself were absolutely bursting for a piss and there was no way whatsoever we’d make it back to Debrecen without a burst bladder or a stopover. Eventually we managed to wring some clemency out of the driver and it was off to the roadside bushes. I peed in public on the puszta amidst cries of “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera” and “Why is my flash not working?” (although the trip was videoed my open air, “coorie doon” micturatory debut did not feature in the final cut). Back on the coach the Hungarian woman asked Neal whether he too was Scottish. He did not pick up on the implication of this question until I drew his attention to it later. Then they began chattering away, he in Croat, she in Serb. She treated him to “her life story”. Then, anguished, he turned to me: “She has just asked me my name, what shall I say?” Earlier he had whispered to me that she had used the male form of polite address in Serb to him and he had not corrected her. He asked me about what his new name should be, muttering something about a kabala and how he must use the same letters as his current appellation. “Neal,” I suggested, “Tell her it’s Neal that your mother liked English names”. “No, I can’t say that,” he hissed, but I heard him use it, so the transformation was accomplished. Frankly I didn’t really care how they would respond if he had used his birth name, though they might have been repelled. You see, Gy, I was happy, warm, alive, full of hope. I found the ambiguity extremely attractive, irresistible even.

He recounted how his roommates, two Irish girls, had stared at him when they caught sight of his body: “You see, I am covered in hair”, he laughed. “Whenever I go to the bathroom in the morning there is a Danish girl next door and she comes out wearing her, how do you say it? (he motioned towards his lower regions) Ah yes, panties, thank you and she always goes back into her room startled when she sees me!”

He has been, needless to say, completely rejected by his family and apparently Croatians are very intolerant of him in general. “Now I am strong, but then, oh it was difficult, but you being here makes me stronger. Now I shall change my name, it shall be exactly as you tell me. I must look after you, I must bring you cakes and wine, I shall visit you in [Waffle Central] and we shall laugh and we shall dance together”. Have you any idea how seductive that simple statement was for me? You ought to know very well how I would interpret it in my present frame of mind, im Klartext, compassion. And I desperately wanted not to part from him, but he had to get up at four thirty in the morning and had not packed yet. The whole csapadék csoport was there in the hall when we arrived, bidding their farewells. He looked at me, kissed me very firmly on each cheek, sighing, and bounded away up the stairs, never letting me out of sight. I gazed after him, utterly devastated. Devastated for bringing all the long buried pain to the surface. Can you imagine how much agony it must have cost him to have to make that choice, the choice to change the most fundamental of all identities. His first puberty was extremely distressing for him. It must have been traumatic to sprout breasts, the most visible indicators of femininity. He feels that it will only be after his operation that he can begin to live as it was intended to be. Around 40. I admire his strength and his courage. He is an outsider and only an outsider can understand me, only someone with this ambivalence inside them can empathise with my darkness, the discrimination and expulsion I have been through. It is always foolish to hope, always foolish to love, always foolish to believe someone else will understand. My feelings towards this person are not ambivalent: I wanted to stay with him, to continue to be close to him. The last thing in the world I wanted was to be torn away from him. My life is perhaps not yet over. I must go to Zagreb or expire with longing. A man who was once a woman. If there is no compassion or understanding there then compassion and understanding are chimeras.

One final aside. He thinks beyond the surface: “Fat, thin, all these things can change or be changed” as if nothing could be easier. When I listened to his calming voice for once I felt as if nothing superficial did matter ultimately. I would go at the drop of a hat. I would hold his hand during the operation.

[Diary Entry, August 1990]

There did not appear to be a path at first, not so much as a rabbit track. The heather has a habit of springing back into place even after a hefty person’s passing. The birch and oak thinned towards the peak, as I knew. I had not been here since childhood and the trail I had trodden then required considerable effort in the making – an entire summer with several scuffings a day and even then I could not be certain. The sun always shone then. I don’t remember rain spoiling an instant, probably because I had the sense to notice the clouds gathering and set off home. Preserving the idyll. I reached the clearing. Running was easier because it was slightly downhill. Now I paused for breath. Listened. The leaves whispered the same secrets to the wind, as in the popular song. A dog barked. My instinct was to hide, as it always had been. Let the intruder pass. Hide and test my skill. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my brow. Vaguely, the hum of travel from the motorway below. A gorse pod popped. My watch had stopped. The dog, a golden Labrador, lolloped past, uninterested. Probably had picked up the scent of deer. A moment later, the owners or minders appeared. A couple in their late teens or early twenties, hand in hand. She blushed suddenly on noticing me, a most charming shyness. I remembered a spot in the thicket of broom nearby – you would have thought it too open, but though there is a lack of sheltering foliage above it is impenetrable to even the most persistent gaze. I felt it would be too presumptuous to mention it to them, besides I couldn’t be sure. The thought amused me. THAK and I had spread the woollen blanket in winter’s nakedness amongst the dried rabbit droppings. Although we remained clothed from the waist up, I still caught a bladder chill. Warming his hands on my breasts. I used to chase the grasshoppers over the edge of the cliff to see if they would leap off. They did, but it took me a while to realize they had wings. Suicide point is the nickname for the sun-baked rock from which to drop into the arms of eternity. The river snakes through the patchwork of fields, grazing cows the size of toys. If I continued straight ahead I ought to reach my hideout. The intervening years seemed distant now. In spite of my sneering magnanimity I knew that the place’s charm was not simply a matter of nostalgia, but that I had fled from the simplicity of restfulness. These trees had waited and grown without effort. I was returning to my private sanctuary where I had planted a sunflower in some idiotic romantic fervour in the days when my locks were long and I listened to Mahler. Sure enough, the twin-trunked oak was there, its bark carved with the initials N.N. My pulse quickened. A fire had been lit, the grass around the gnarled roots was black and worse, someone had tried to bury a plastic bag. I had to scrape it with a branch, carefully, to avoid tearing it and spilling the contents only to gather them up again. I froze, imagining I had caught a glimpse of movement, but it was just a deer if anything. The break in my concentration allowed me to realize what had been making me feel uneasy: the smell, sweet, but concentrated. I no longer wanted to touch the bag or the soil around it – the childish enthusiasm for buried treasure replaced by the dry fear of a more sinister find. I prodded at it. Resilient, but not inflexible. I held my breath, but curiosity prevailed over reason, so I pierced it. The stench intensified. Slowly I prised it from the earth to reveal a human arm, in three pieces, a gold ring upon the third finger of the hand. You almost believed me, didn’t you?

I had a collection mania then. Dozens of glistening black slugs trailing up my arms, or the thousands of ladybirds gathered in my ankle-length skirt during the plague year at my Auntie E’s in England. When we played next door one of the regular games involved walking round the shed, starting a minute or so apart. Trying to avoid each other, we kept meeting face to face, but when we did so we had to change direction, announcing the move with a scream. It was cheating to stand still and wait to see what the others were doing, but usually we let R keep going round and round, following him in our pack of three or lying in wait to jump out at him. Another favourite was trams. Whichever of us was in front would stretch both arms up to the clothes lines, the others clasping her around the waist, speeding up until we arrived at one of the green metal poles, which functioned as a stop. We crossed over to their garden via the midden. Theirs was piled with freshly mown grass, whilst ours was more dangerous with rose bush clippings and sharp lilac branches, but it never stopped us from taking the short cut. Amongst the old potatoes and rotting rhubarb leaves there was always at least one jam jar for my Dad to deposit his fishing worms when he dug the borders in his wellies.

Pigeons squat between the desolate concrete beams of the railway bridge. A sneer of yellow cranes looks down on the junction-snarled traffic. Every weed-choked plot is being reclaimed for profit, barracks converted to open plan offices, a rash of gleaming banks spreading towards the suburbs. Diggers gouge holes in the rubble-strewn soil, the clatter of pots and the evening flicker of TV screens behind net curtains long banished. The grey season enfolds and smothers us.

Steadying myself as I stand in the Metro carriage, my thoughts drift beyond the retina-scalding orange interior and the muttered imprecations of the stinking tramp whose plea for small change or cigarettes has once again been ignored, his proffered plastic cup empty. I could have ripped the pages of the three volumes from their bindings and burned them, placing the ashes in separate bags before stapling them inside the covers and posting them back to him. Although he was desperate for me to return the books he could not bring himself to ask. He may have scoured the antiquarian sellers in the hope of finding replacements, his father the spy mentioned in a footnote. I have not forgiven him, though the parcel will doubtless be misinterpreted as absolution.

A poster shudders me from my immature fantasies of preparing a box of chocolates with soft centres hand-rolled from my own excrement for him to bite into unsuspecting, tied round with a purple ribbon. Its caption: Our transport has evolved, what about you? Muck-streaked cavemen slung with bear pelts engage in several varieties of anti-social behaviour: one crouches on the floor of the tram, peering intently as he pokes a stick up the already revealing skirt to improve the view by pulling the fabric back, another contemplates the artistic merits of his composition of palm prints in mud over the door panels, yet another tucks into a dinosaur egg, scooping out great handfuls of yolk having discarded the shell, a fragment of which has landed on the head of a startled fellow passenger whilst a bus driver reels from the blast of a huge conch right in his ear. The final image depicts a heavily pregnant woman clinging for dear life to a pole whilst a group of hirsute knuckle-draggers stretch their legs oblivious from the comfort of their seats. The train pulls into the station at the end of the line. Please remember to obliterate your tickets before boarding admonishes the sign.

“And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells”
Keats, To Autumn

A film of condensation protects the modesty of the veranda panes following my bath with door ajar. The lawn is damp with mid-morning dew and wasps zigzag wearily above the moss. The intruding cat is curled in a patch of sunlight beyond the shadow cast by the house, cobwebs hang heavy with captured breeze-borne seeds. The howl and despairing bark of strays bundled into the catcher’s van travels down the road, dissipating in the air’s indifferent calm, a shiver of concentrated anguish.

My Mother hunched over a crossword in the kitchen with her well-thumbed dictionaries, folded tea towel to prevent her elbows from bruising, the local radio’s phone in talk show parading the decline in education standards before her half-listening ear. A few hours of solitude before my Father’s return from the fellowship, sausages on a low flame sizzling in the pan.

The tentacles of commercialism have not yet extended as far as the shops behind. Litter blows unheeded around the deserted car park. The rasp of magpies hacks through the cirrus-scarred sky like a smoker’s cough.

[1997 and 2004]

“Poverty is more than deprivation, it is a state of constant want and acute misery whose ignominy consists in its dehumanizing force; poverty is abject because it puts men under the absolute dictates of their bodies, that is, under the absolute dictate of necessity as all men know it from their most intimate experience and outside all speculations”
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Poor people eat chips and pies,
Laugh in the streets,
Spit at you with their eyes.

I was born in a dreary, predominantly middle-class city in Scotland, surrounded by arable land, a magnet for the wealthy farmers who flocked there to spend their cash. A narrow-minded, puritanical little hole if ever there was one. Too small to settle in, too idyllic to leave without a pang of longing. My sole ambition was to shake the dust of its thoroughfares off my feet. I was not destined for drab anonymity. I was not destined to dance attendance on some male, an unpaid servant pandering to his every whim and wish. Why could my contemporaries not see it? Why did they chase after the agents of their own destruction in an absurd and orgiastic connivance? Why did they assume that I, who steadfastly refused to emulate them, was inferior? I consoled myself with a resolve that never wavered, with the certainty of the clear-sighted. Marriage was an evil, the equivalent of a lobotomy, willing servitude, a life-sentence.

My formative years were spent on an estate built largely by the local council. Of course, our house, a semi-detached with front and back gardens, separate driveway and garage, was far superior to the pebble-dash blocks that comprised the rest of the street, since the latter contained flats, one upstairs and one downstairs and shared a communal back green for hanging out the washing on vile contraptions like the skeletons of umbrellas blown inside out in a gale. The families on the ground floor had a patch of lawn and a border for flowers, provided they could be bothered trowelling, planting, watering and weeding in public view that is. The children above had concrete stairways that they pretended were fortresses. Our house was not owned by us, nor could we buy it, even if we wished. It had been built, along with the identical neighbouring dwellings in the row, by a charitable trust. Only wounded war veterans, injured in service of their country, were permitted to live there. A plaque by the front windows commemorated the generous benefactors responsible for funding the construction. We would sometimes startle passers-by whose curiosity had overcome their normal sense of decorum and who stood, gawping at the dedication, by throwing stones at them from the dining-room window. It was not very pleasant thinking you were on continual display, a local attraction, a misfit, but it did confer a certain prestige.

Since my parents never assumed that my femininity represented a handicap in respect of school performance, I was not even aware that women could be considered inferior to men until much later. My first encounter with the misery of class snobbery came when I was discriminated against at school. What I found so deeply offensive was that the bullies had no legitimation for their claims to inherent superiority. True, their parents owned their homes, unlike mine. True, their houses were located in a hilltop suburb looking down on the terraced huddles. I, however, was brighter than all of them and so my intelligence has become the source of my self-respect, my self-definition.

Hunter’s Crescent and the streets surrounding it languished at the bottom of the league table of residential areas. Children from the scheme wore hand-me-downs, swore at the teachers and were shorter than the rest of us. Their eyes were solemn, yet shrewd and glinted with the sly watchfulness of those who do not know where their next meal is coming from. We had a song about them: “I wanna go home, I wanna go home, tae my wee hoose in Hunters, And when ye get there, they chop off yer hair [a common practice amongst school nurses to facilitate the inspection of their scalps for lice infestations], At my wee hoose in Hunters, The porridge is great, ye don’t need a plate, Ye just need a hammer and a chisel, I wanna go home, I wanna go home, Tae my wee hoose in Hunters”.

They were branded as “minks” (a variation on “tinks”, or tinkers, travelling people) and, if you were foolish enough to touch them, even by accident, you contracted a contagion, “the bugs”, which could only be removed by washing your hands vigorously (although, if you wiped your polluted hand on someone else’s sleeve, you were instantly cleansed, having passed them on). At the same time as we mocked them, we also feared them, as they had a reputation for being tougher than the rest of the pupils at the primary school, preferring to resolve disputes by hair-pulling, punching or full-blown fisticuffs. They were not expected to achieve: teachers did not waste valuable time on them or show surprise when they began to fall behind.

Unlike my classmates, I did not mind associating with Hunters children, as long as they did not pick fights with me. The others had already rejected me. I used to feed Kenneth S crisps during playtime. He was constantly hungry and easy to provoke into tears. Our classmates called him “potato head”, as it had a very pronounced square shape. He was not very bright, but I felt sorry for him and I understood his fits of rage when the teachers picked him out as a troublemaker again and again, although he had not been doing anything wrong. One of my favourite activities involved a felt tip pen and an empty crisp bag full of sand and dust. I would draw the outline of a yacht, car, bird or some other simple figure on a metal drain cover in one corner of the playground before pouring the fine grains over them as if icing a cake. Once a few seconds had elapsed I would gently blow the layer away leaving the original image in grit. Kenneth acted as my bodyguard whilst I worked, arms folded as he kept a look out for troublemakers in the navy jumper and knee-exposing grey shorts he was sent to school in regardless of the season.

Maureen S was of Irish extraction, pale, freckled, slender and supple. She was a talented gymnast who only needed to be discovered. If Hunters children were expected to be good at anything at all, it was sport. Never were they more popular than when a team was being selected. Football, volleyball, netball, sprinting, gymnastics. Their bodies were more accustomed to punishment, their stamina correspondingly greater. As long as their aptitudes were non-academic, they did not challenge the assumptions imposed upon them. What a shock it would have been to the system if one of them had belied its cynicism.

I only visited her home once, though she regularly visited me. It was to deliver a bin liner full of cast-off clothes for her and her brother. Normally we were too afraid to set foot in that estate, with its wandering gangs and its vandals, its notoriety hanging over it like a noxious cloud, keeping the respectable at bay. She lived at its heart, in a cramped flat on the second floor of the tenement. The stench of urine in the stairwell mingled with cigarette smoke. Inside the floors, even in the living room, were covered with grubby linoleum, the sparse furnishings local, from the late Thirties/early Forties, worn and scratched. She shared a room with her brother, a deprivation of private space the indignity of which I had never suffered. Her mother, only slightly taller than Maureen herself, swore when she spoke, but was kind, immediately putting the kettle on for a cup of tea. Until then I had failed to understand why Maureen never invited me round. She was ashamed. We never discussed this, it remained an unspoken secret between us and, whenever I could, I stuffed her with dainty sandwiches I cut myself (cucumbers or salmon spread) and slabs of rich fruit cake. My mother willingly collaborated, letting me use the best china and the silver tray. (The Victorians had their drawing rooms, not intended for use except on special occasions; we had our porcelain, which took pride of place in the display cabinet, regularly dusted). On moving to secondary school Maureen and I lost touch and I have no idea what happened to her.

My Father looked down on the residents of Hunters because they flouted the standards he had been taught to uphold. I will never forget the mixture of disgust and amazement with which he recounted the tale of the man from Hunters who had been stopped by the police for some obvious breach of MOT regulations and who, on being informed that he would have to pay a fine, settled up on the spot, removing a twenty pound note from a wallet bulging with cash. For him, such an attitude must have been the ultimate betrayal, contenting oneself with squalor, allowing one’s family to sink into privation and despair whilst possessing the means to stop the rot.

Now the entire district has been spruced up thanks to an urban regeneration grant. Boarded up windows, fire-blackened walls and packs of growling stray dogs no longer warn off the casual stroller. The old chippie, to which teenagers thronged for cigarettes and bottles of Thompson Craik lemonade in garish green and red, has been demolished. The huge jars of pickled onions and boiled eggs that graced the metal counter have disappeared, along with the dilemma over salt and sauce (diluted HP squirted from the nozzle of an appropriately brown plastic bottle), salt and vinegar or the most decadent option of all, chips with curry sauce. A lick of paint, a few tentative blades of grass, double glazing and the new name of Fairfields do not suffice, however, to deter the graffiti-artists or the vandals.

[To NM, 17th August, 1997]

Dear N,

I am sitting in the garden at my friend’s house in Hellerup. The wind bears the traffic hum from the motorway, a plane drones overhead, a lawnmower works in the distance. The poppy heads are green, like pepperpots, soon they will scatter their seeds; the tomatoes ripen in the evening sun, the apples rot on the branches, red and green paprikas hang listless, a bee’s wings vibrate noisily as it attempts to land within a recalcitrant host, cornflowers white, pink and (my favourite) blue fill the borders and a single dark dahlia curls, shrinking away from the heat. The lawn is half brown, but not overgrown, a tended space. I watch the bubbles rising impatiently in the bottle of lemon-flavoured mineral water. Children are playing beyond the fence. A wood pigeon croons. The bricks beneath my bare feet are still warm, though the sun is gradually setting between two fir trees. Rhubarb grows by the plastic barrels that catch the rainwater and soon I shall have to fill the can and relieve the thirst of the pot-bound. I was too lazy to catch a bus or an S-train and, on the way here, asked the taxi driver what the weather had been like. 31 degrees, sunshine, not the merest wisp of cloud. Summer at last. A vine crawls up the bricks beyond the guiding confines of the lattice. I can look through the stair window from here – her volumes of Hockney. Thistle-down floats idly on the barely perceptible breeze – fairy godmother – catch her, make a wish and set her free. In her gratitude, she will make your wish come true.

A fragrance of tea roses – magpie overhead – raspberries, brambles, syrup, a drop of moisture to wipe gently from your lips, a drop of honey to smear on them – if I had a white rose, I would stain it red for you with my precious blood – stain your tongue with the juice of fruit, with wine.

We can never be free, but are dictated to by our very physicality, our appetites. We can never be free, but are exposed, as long as we choose to live, to experience. Our senses, the concentration of one touch, urgency, arms spread wide open, waiting. Walking down a pedestrian precinct, snatches of languages, T-shirts, jeans, coffee grinders, bottle openers, amber enclosing ancient insects, church spires, a fountain with paddling storks, water, water. Experience is everything. Rubble, dust, smashed window panes. We evaluate our experience in a social context. Right and wrong, they tell us. We agree to the extent that we accept the order that surrounds us. A world behind appearances, independent of appearances – which conceal and confuse – a pond’s surface, undisturbed, dip in a finger and the image is distorted – a haze of consciousness, false recognition, something beyond, something deeper, velvet folds of my petals, sip the nectar, contemplation – stationary, rooted, by a desk or a table, in a cell or a library – the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, centuries of wax, smoke and dirt from the devotional candles and the incense offerings, controversy about the restoration – fresh glory of colours – rewriting the textbooks about his language in paint – Edinburgh: the Scott Monument, blackened by the chimneys and the railways – the Council have decided to leave it as cleaning would wear away the sandstone and the tourists expect it to be imposing, soot-clad, grimy.

Road movies. Liberated from duty and obligation, the hero/heroine is nothing more than a traveller, who may observe and participate to the extent he/she deems desirable. Wandering – Wanderjahre – an apprenticeship, learning through shifting perspective – relationships and roles constantly changing as the journey continues – one town, one adventure – no world behind appearances – just superficiality – time is needed to discover, but there is no time when you must keep moving forward – restlessness, perpetual motion – never stay in one place long enough to form a real attachment or gain a real understanding – no final destination, except for death. Random factor. Chance encounters. No responsibility, so no inhibitions, no apologies to make, no standards of behaviour to conform to. Take, give a little, taste, flee, flee lest you stagnate, lest the roots erupt from the ground beneath your feet and coil seductively around your ankles – brutality – disjointed – the thread is the thread of perception, the unifying narrator the owner of the experiences. There is no permanence, better to travel until your youth and your strength fail you. No plot, no purpose.

Our perception of ourselves is not our identity. Our identity is social – it is the perception of ourselves by others, through the filter of norms of acceptability, through the filter of the authority of unspoken assumption. Despair fills us when the disparity between who we know we are and who we are told we are, who we are permitted to be, who we are accepted as is too great. Belief in an unshakeable truth is nothing more than a mandate to impose your will upon others. [Hoeing, the insistent chatter of blue tits]. Fall beyond the boundaries set by the presumed majority at your peril. Tyranny of taste, tyranny of structure – invoking the sanction of the Absolute – paraphernalia of control – priestly vestments to reassure you there is meaning – the truncheon and riot shield to coerce you when you protest. The neatest trick of all is the deadweight of assumption, of what we have been lulled into NOT questioning, so that it appears “natural” and “normal” and is immune to enquiry. Truth is subjective. Events are subjective. Our societies set a premium on our identity, whether it be our gender identity or our national identity. We breathe meaning into these physical or administrative facts, a meaning which, in turn, determines our approach to others. A framework for understanding – and we have lost our faith in all but our bodily reality – so we chase after pleasures and weep when we are denied. Urgency again. Life is loss with a few brief moments of gain. I choose to defy. The more society rejects me, the harder I spurn society, but it is difficult. Exhausting. You know this. Rest with me.

Small gnats dance and the air has grown chill. I picked some ripe tomatoes and sprinkled them with salt. Ants are crawling everywhere.

In P-shire, where I come from, instead of vineyards we have rows and rows of raspberry bushes, field after field. In the school holidays, the local children would earn pocket money by going to the “berries” – clambering on to a truck at 8.30 in the morning to fill bucket after bucket, the more buckets, the greater the amount in your hand at the end of the day. These raspberries are canned and exported all over the world. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, Scotland is the major international producer of canned raspberries. When I was an undergraduate living in K – my first extended stay abroad – I was shopping in “Aldi”, the cut price supermarket when, to my delight, I found a tin of Scottish raspberries. I ate them with cream that evening. In summer, after school, my brother and I would cross the playing fields to the wild raspberries – inevitably the thorns would snag on the uniforms, scratch our legs, but the hunt for the red amongst the flowers and the green distracted us from such minor inconveniences. Sometimes, when you bit into one, it would be sour and writhe with tiny white maggots and you’d have to spit it out and throw the rest away. Home we would trudge for tea, through the long grass of the banking, shouting towards the empty buildings that had cooped us up, to hear the echo. Cuckoo spit – the nest of a tiny green larva.

Tomorrow I have to make my way into town, to the Parliament building where the course is being held. Eva’s cat, Fay, has arrived, sitting on the roof behind me, intent on the dragonflies that flit tantalisingly beyond her reach. I must retreat indoors now, it’s becoming damp.
Sleep well, my dear, in spite of the heat.

[To Gy, 1997]

Edinburgh, mid-80s, Saturday afternoon in the ritual combat season. Rival coaches parked all the way along London Road, the shop fronts on Easter Road shuttered in preparation. Chemist’s, grocer’s, kebab emporium, pet purveyor’s protected with stell rigidity against the violence of defeat and inebriation. Sometimes, trudging home from the library, I forgot. The supermarket, the freezer discount store with the cheapest fresh milk in town would not admit me. A stream of men, young and old, boys in team strips waving scarves, the colours. Mounted police just in case. Slow progress along the dusty pavements. Then, from the refuge of my bedroom on Albion Road, the cheers, the jubilation. I never witnessed the rowdiness for which supporters have become the stock metaphor. No beer cans flung to gash a forehead, no skinhead disruptors. Chants, laughter, expectation, but never mindless fury.

The Meadows, by the University. Summoned by a leaflet. Without a grant, how could I continue my studies? Pawning my future for a loan? Discontent, marching. Representatives from the National Union of Students from London equipped with whistles to guide us along the route that would cause maximum disruption and inconvenience to the uninvolved. Police escort. They began to sing: “Maggie Thatcher’s got one, Norman Fowler is one”. I joined in, though I did not entirely approve. This was too political. My quarrel was not with the Prime Minister or the Education Secretary, but with the principle of paying for access to higher learning, which would deter those from a similar background from ever trying to succeed. Such primitive hatred would surely do nothing to advance our arguments. Up by the castle and back to where we started. The biggest student demonstration Scotland had ever seen. On returning, the cameras were ready as were the speakers. Copies of “Socialist Worker” on sale, pleas for solidarity with the proletariat. Exit labourer’s daughter.

Glasgow. Summer. Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. Drinks for sale, but who would budge from their fought-over patch of melting tarmac to buy them? Tickets at inflated prices for those unfortunate devotees who had not been quick enough off the mark. I had coughed up £25, a fortune. For standing room in the front section. Even having arrived early in the morning, I was quite far from the entrance. U2, my favourite group, a popular preference. The doors finally opened in the fading light. Programmes, T-shirts, badges, posters available as we queued. Suddenly, space, dashing to the front. As the support act came on stage, I was lifted by the surge, rendered incapable of determining my own movements, my feet literally not touching the ground. Nor could I breathe, the crush of sweating bodies too tight. Like frantic waves breaking against a cliff the fans hurled themselves relentlessly at the security guards to cross the barriers, to no avail. Forward they heaved, each rebuttal renewing their resolve, the sheer force of their efforts. By this stage I was virtually unconscious and in some distress. The spectators in the cheaper seats looked down upon us without sympathy. Finally respite when the set concluded. Relaxation, withdrawal. I retired to the relatively depopulated rear of the section. They sought proximity to the beloved, the idols. So close the precious beads of sweat could drip upon you. Fainting girls are not the products of hormone-rich hysteria, but of oxygen deprivation induced by mass exuberance.

Scone. East of Scotland Bible Week, 1981. Let the spirit flood through your being. Eyes shut to screen out unnecessary distractions, reducing sensory input, focusing on the godhead. Music boosted through huge speakers. Familiar songs of worship blending with unfamiliar tongues to a crescendo of release in absorption. Embrace your brothers and your sisters, clasp their hands. The canvas of the marquee billowing in the chill evening breeze. Words are uncommunicative. The newly baptised strewn over the straw matting, felled, immobilised, “slain in the spirit”. Peace, peace.

What absurd variety surrounds us, what absurd abundance. Can we even name the trees and the plants? Daffodils, daisies, lilac, cherry, dandelion, hogweed, ash, oak, beech, plane, primrose, nettle, convolvulus, ivy. Punks and piercers with rings and studs in their nostrils, through the tender skin of the eyebrows, pink-dyed Mohicans, gentlemen in suits wielding umbrellas and briefcases, mothers with prams and pushchairs, dreadlocks, orange robes, matted tangle protruding from shop doorway sleeping bags, baseball caps and trainers. Resting, moving. Purposeful, purposeless. Watchful, begging, daydreaming, perched on bar stools sipping foamy coffee, browsing through CDs, selecting fruit from street stall displays. A young man of Chinese origin in scarlet thigh boots and black leather miniskirt clears the bystanders with his incoherent utterings. Teenagers giggle, yet he remains oblivious. Give me your change, the palm thrust in your path. Bleating flocks hungry for entertainment, thirsty for activity, on the pick-up. Saturday night in London.

[Waffle Central]. Guest bathroom. I use the basin to wash my hands because the water in the tap heats up more quickly there. The mirror startles me. Who is this staring at me so solemnly? Green eyes, burst capillaries in the cheeks, downward turning lips? A parody of how I perceive myself. A monstrous figure that bears no relation to the waif in mourning black who laid a homage of red roses and purple irises at Mahler’s grave, who kissed the sandstone sphinx at Bellevue, posing for a portrait in the file of frozen memories. Identity is supremely transitory, changing over time with the accumulation of experience, fresh insights and information. Old identities become superfluous as they outlive their usefulness, losing their appeal. What is it that brings about change? If the pressure towards cohesion and homogeneity is so strong, how do we resist? Even identical twins are different. I have not yet discovered a convincing explanation. Temperament and disposition, a unique balance of humours as a means of reconciling similarity and difference. As we grow older we become alien to our former selves. The self is a shifting, intangible entity. We grow, discarding our past Me’s like so much extraneous matter.

When we move in groups, united by a common purpose, we shed our sense of self like a snake sloughs off its skin, revealing a new pattern beneath. Crowds are strong and wilful. Crowds defy authority and conventional norms of appropriate behaviour, rejecting the standards of the invisible majority because, in a crowd, you are immersed in the majority, sheer numbers laughing at coercion. When others cast off their inhibitions around you, you feel sanctioned to follow suit. Crowds are notoriously difficult to control and notoriously open to manipulation, meek, pliable. We congregate to attain a specific aim or merely out of curiosity. These days we can consume endless flows of information passively, from our homes (with the option to switch off should our attention drift), soaking it in from manipulated sources. The bias may be overt or concealed, but it always exists. British news, [Waffelian] news, an assigning of priorities on the basis of national and political interests. We have no need to take to the streets unless stirred by deep conviction or dire urgency. Home shopping, home banking, home working, home learning, society recedes, shrinks, becomes increasingly abstract. We continue to have obligations, we pay the taxes (by direct debit or by means of the form dropped through our letterboxes), but our actual contacts with the administration diminish in number. We do not encounter the bureaucrats face to face unless we are unemployed or otherwise reduced to state dependency, forced to stand in line, squandering the time of which we have a surfeit, humiliated, all for the sake of appending our signatures to a piece of paper. Dependent on our computer screens, our fellow beings lose their solidity and we lose our ability to relate meaningfully to them. Isolation. A dictatorship of those who control information. Apathy and non-engagement. Distance and dehumanisation. Only the home is safe and free from surveillance. Public spaces are dangerous, empty, deserted, patrolled by gangs of thugs brandishing broken bottles, no fit place for the weak or old or women. Kafka, Orwell, H. G. Wells, Bradbury. Rallies, protests, latent aggression. Banners proclaim our affiliation, our espousal of a cause. Shoulder to shoulder we listen to speakers whose eloquence amplifies our outrage at injustice. Strikes, honouring the leader whose image decorates the dingy walls, the monarch as the nation made flesh, waving paper flags and cheering at the limousine that glides by, a glimpse of a gloved hand. Carnival, processions of saintly relics around cathedrals, we have an appetite for spectacle. Guy Fawkes’ hanging, drawing and quartering is not recalled, the burning of the effigy no longer commemorates the foiling of a fiendish plot to destroy the institution of democracy, the saving of Parliament from the forces of reaction, but the signal for a fireworks display.

Saint Paul that old misogynist recognised the waning effect of isolation, its dissipation of faith. It is good to meet to celebrate the fellowship of redemption, he insisted. Christ in mystical communion with his followers, the natural imagery of the body institutionalising the relationship of mutual dependence: the members of the church related, united, essential to each other. Collective identities are fragile, requiring constant reaffirmation, as Durkheim argued. Protestantism and its emphasis on the personal relationship with God. Direct contact unhampered by a rabble of intermediaries or obscure and excluding incantations in an obsolete tongue. The cult of the individual. Mass society, mass education, mass economy, the individual assuming increasing importance as a contributor to the welfare and prosperity of the nation. The bureaucrat’s grief over the fallen sparrow. Eternal life in Christ transmuted into eternal life within the nation (Armstrong). Until we reconcile ourselves to our own mortality, we shall continue to crave outside assurance that invests our brief span with meaning, that comforts us our essence is not lost forever once our bodies cease to function. Writing is a form of immortality. Civilisations rise and fall, their architectural gems vandalised or eroded, but the products of their culture live on (our obsession with the past, with archaeology and history is in part a quest for confirmation, in part a product of nationalism, in part inquisitiveness and in part a validation of our own society as the best and most advanced known to mankind. All great civilisations have been intoxicated with pride at the awesomeness of their achievements, believed in themselves as the most benign and cultured and all have come to and end). Passing on genetic material is not enough, as it does not perpetuate the self. Writing, the product of an individual mind, is far more satisfactory, although there are no guarantees that it will be preserved.

The Incomprehensible Past, or Authority and Gullibility. The attitude to authority has undergone a radical transformation. Democracy and the notion of equality of human beings, each of whom is invested with inalienable rights deriving from shared humanity entitles all, in theory, to access to power. Legitimation derives from the sovereign will of the people; the state must act in the best interests of its citizens. There is no longer a single truth operating in the world that subordinates all of reality to its ineluctable logic. We have a greater distaste for, antipathy towards arbitrariness, particularly as a justification for privilege. Suitability for office becomes a matter for public scrutiny and acclamation. However, bitter lessons in warfare and manipulation have undermined our confidence in those stewards or caretakers to whom we have delegated responsibility for ruling us. Governments callously conspire against their own people with no thought for their welfare. Our innocence has been irretrievably lost. The scandal provoked by clandestine experiments in the States in the 1950s that recently became public knowledge when the relevant documents were declassified vindicating the distrust. When scientists were given permission to deliberately contaminate the water supplies of rural townships with radioactive material to ascertain whether radiation had a detrimental effect on foetuses. Who would vote for a government that gave its approval to such involuntary trials? Information is withheld “for our own good” to allow those in power to continue to enjoy the exercise of that power.

We are amused by reports of the panic caused by Orson Wells’ radio dramatisation of “The War of the Worlds” smugly congratulating ourselves on our greater discernment, more accustomed as we are to the media. How quaint were our forefathers, how credulous, how easily swayed, how obedient to their lords and masters. We watch the documentaries of the saluting throng, tut in pious disapproval at the barbarism of pyres of books, smashed-in windows and sewn on stars. We could never fall for dictators. We would never let ourselves be taken in by demagoguery. The corner shop is raided, the alarm ringing disturbs our viewing, but it is only high spirits or some tearaways after a bit of spending money. Should make more of an effort to integrate, learn to speak English properly, stop stealing our jobs…What are they doing over here anyway if they can’t respect our traditions? Numbed, we swallow the contents of the broadcasts uncritically. Catastrophe, calamity are common occurrences. We watch torrents of mud sweep away everything in their path, earthquakes demolishing skyscrapers, flood victims hauled into rowing boats or winched into helicopters, clutching at a few salvaged possessions. We do not feel the damp; we do not smell the blood, the death. The same screen that presents us with these stories presents us with the trials and tribulations of fictitious characters. Small wonder that we remain impassive, for who can be bothered to distinguish between the unreality of distant events and the unreality of narratives of non-existent communities? The soap operas at least address our everyday experience. Their situations and dilemmas are familiar, we can more easily and readily empathise with them. So our compassion is blunted, as long as we are not directly affected we remain complacent.

If our governments betray us, if they are not to be trusted, who can we trust? Who will defend us against the evils of corruption? Journalists step into the breach for the sake of a scoop, a sensation, a boosted circulation. Front page revelation, the truth is out! Tireless investigation and research has brought you the machinations and unbridled lust for victory at the polls that led to the BSE epidemic, to CJD. Members of the press depict themselves as guardians of morality, the counterweight to politicians, debunkers/deposers of those unfit for office, whilst glossing over the seamier side of their profession, the fabrications that they perpetrate themselves, the baser motives of profit or annihilating an opponent, obscuring the symbiosis between themselves and their chosen targets. Behind the rhetoric of mutual dislike and suspicion, journalists and politicians feed off each other. Both profess to speak on behalf of the people, the same people they make a living out of. For politicians to be ignored is to die. Control of information is control of society.

We want our leaders to be infallible. We expect them to be superhuman, possessed of superior wisdom and abilities. We want perfection of them, a moral purity that matches the trust we have placed in them, the qualities we have attributed to them, the power we have vested in them. How sad we are to be disillusioned! How disappointed to find out they are fashioned from the same flawed material as the rest. How undignified the bickering over divorce arrangements amongst the Royals, how mundane, how sordid. What hope is there for us if those who are meant to set an example stumble?

[To AL, 16th October, 1986]

My dearest brother,

I am now sitting in a bus, which will start off for E in a few minutes, so my handwriting may become shaky. My situation has worsened 100%. Last Sunday, my parents decided that they were giving me two weeks to move out, and I may never return, all the possessions collected over my 21-year lifespan are to be removed and I’m not allowed to stay even during the holidays. Why? Because I’m immoral. Because they are against THAK moving in somewhere with me. Not that I’ll find anywhere, I don’t think. They have no idea I’m marrying him without letting on. How can they say they’re Christians, then throw me out on to the streets? THAK is unemployed and has no prospect of a job (besides I do not see why someone of his talent should be forced to slave away for eight hours a day to make someone else richer, instead of being given free rein to exercise his gifts). We’ve hunted high and low for a flat. It’s exhausting and unrewarding. Even commuting every day takes it out of you. I get up at 6.30 in the morning to walk to the bus, taking the last one back at 9.00. Work has to be squeezed in between accommodation-hunting and trying to find somewhere to get food cheaper than £2.50 a head. I paid THAK’s rent this week. This is not living. The DHSS want me to hand over £167, or I won’t be eligible for an old-age pension; EOH are sending me a bill for 70 DM as my room wasn’t clean enough when I left and the Bettwäsche missing (which is simply not true: I handed in a complete set of linen a week before my departure). The washbasin was dirty because TK forgot to wipe a cloth over it before handing in the keys as he had promised. I had no time to finish the job myself. I washed the curtains as stipulated in the Mietsvertrag, but they claim I hadn’t so I have no choice but to stump up as I am not there to defend myself. My bank balance is down to £270, not even enough to cover the cost of a single room smaller than in EOH over a term – doesn’t matter anyway (the bus is moving off now) because you’re not allowed to stay in a residence during the holidays and, of course, I’ve nowhere to put my stuff. My relatives have all cut me off, naturally. THAK is confined in one room without heating (too expensive) and one little lamp. He can’t sleep it’s too cold and his landlady, a spinster of 70-odds, is a raving loony who talks to herself constantly, lecturing him on his dress, his lack of a job, etc. Having arrived back from Germany two days later than he had originally informed her, he discovered that she had reported him to the police as a missing person. He is in debt to the tune of £700 (rent due on his previous rooms), where his female flat mate had been responsible for the money, which he passed on faithfully (trusting her) only to find she had squandered it on herself. There are a lot of sharks about in the property business who fix a rent and then increase it as soon as they find out you are receiving DHSS benefits: “The Social will pay it” their standard reply to protests. My studying is being knackered by this – how can I concentrate on my work? I’m selling off all I own (except the camera). Even that represents only a temporary solution.

So, if you don’t hear from me in the next three weeks, I’m dead. There is no way out of this impasse. Perhaps I should kill my parents. At least prison would offer me a roof over my head. Or perhaps I’ll go on to Princes Street, unsheathe my blade and hack everyone in my path until I’m shot down. Or maybe I’ll just shove the tempered steel into my own guts, leaving my parents to foot the massive cleaning bill for the stains left by the blood and intestines spilling all over the carpet.

I detest society, but there can be no changing it (except perhaps for attitudes). I used to hate it on theoretical grounds: the spiritual immorality, the material addiction. Now I hate both it and the church because they both seek my destruction, or at least the artificial stifling of my development. I cannot write without intellectual stimulus in the form of discussion on philosophy and literature, even if I do now view the university as a bloated, overpaid, sclerotic debating club for wealthy, spoiled, ignorant bastards (the majority) with a few genuinely talented (rich and poor) individuals thrown in to warrant the continuation of the circus. I don’t have anything against the affluent as such, but if they misuse their resources on conspicuous consumption (open and boastful waste), I despise them. I also loathe stupid people, regardless of their social background. What a beautiful sunrise beyond the pane. I belong to no social class (in material terms I am now consigned to the underclass below the poverty line): my class is a spiritual group. We have reached moral awareness, spiritual purity. Not that one human being is innately superior to another: we are all made up of the same flesh and blood. Materially, our value is identical. Economically speaking, we can be shoved into categories of value according to social function (employment) or inherited position (high status). I also hate this nonsense in our politics/history lectures about “anonymous economic forces”. Market forces are human inventions allowed to go too far, to become too complex (invested with an air of mysticism, like some prime-mover of the universe), a justification for greed and selfishness on an international scale.

The bus has stopped in K.

Do you realize that even if I wanted a baby, I could never afford to have one? THAK has been reassuring me that “where there’s a will there’s a way”, the same as you would have done (“optimism”, remember?), but that’s only true if I give up my studies, put up with a piss-paid dead-end job and settle for unhappiness for the rest of my life.

This world is an evil, cynical place where human life totally devoid of worth. People are nothing but pawns of those in power, of industrialists, of Arbeitsgeber. I will not allow my spirit to be extinguished, thus I will probably have to choose death.

My brother’s being chucked out too – he’s been arrested again – he came home drunk out of his skull (his normal state of existence) and started to fight my Dad who called the police. My brother then proceeded to beat up two officers; they called for back-up (another five) before managing to pin him down. By way of retaliation he was given a good kicking in his cell. He was released and fined £125, which my parents have taken care of – they’re also financing his motor bike to the tune of £400. But giving me zero. But then, I’ve never asked them for money. You see now that no matter how intolerable life was in K, it was still better than this. I have one pair of shoes (the canvas ones Martina gave me), which already have holes in them. I can’t afford a luxury like footwear.

Assuming I’m still around I doubt I’ll have enough time to complete your birthday present. I bought a calligraphy set to copy out “Isoüe” on to parchment paper in my own (practices) hand to be illustrated by THAK.

If I’m not around, brother, I charge you with all the love and respect you claim to have for me to finish “Isoüe” for me, to piece together all the manuscript notes and fragments and use your imagination to fill in the rest. Nobody else is to soil this story – you have the ability to complete it for me. If I kill myself, I know THAK will follow. Suicide is as much his as my solution. There is no meaning or purpose to life. The artist helps to make it bearable to his public, whether they be the masses or the intellectuals. God refuses to intervene, making a mockery of Himself, allowing selfish people to abuse His name, setting up social clubs known as churches, which, as a qualification for membership, enforce high-flying, misery-producing moral clauses to convince them they belong to an elite, the band of the elect, the saved amongst the teeming mass of sinners. Great social change always brings great insecurity in its wake. Such as we witness now: computerization, particularly computer-steered assembly lines, the growing gap between employed and unemployed underclass.

Yes, I am being bitter about my destiny, for once. I should accept it, but when I see ignorant people prosper, enjoying their empty lives and pleasures, it irritates me to the extreme. Although I am not ignorant, they treat me like a piece of dog shit on the pavement, scraping me off on the kerb. I will never forget what society has done to me. After having spent my entire existence trying to please others, living for them. Even if I wanted to, I could not live for myself. I don’t have the money and am too fat and unattractive besides. I am cutting my parents out of my life (reciprocal process) and will never see them again, even if they should later regret their actions. A coffin or a useless life dominated by concerns such as where my next meal is coming from or where I am to live. An animal existence – worse, since I am cursed with the powers of thought and reason.

I am so utterly exhausted that I feel (and look like) a middle aged woman. Germany sapped my strength to the minimum, hence my leg, that illness [an insect bite that turned septic – fortunately, I responded well to the antibiotics, narrowly avoiding an amputation]. I hadn’t been sick in years. It’s influenced by energy, spiritual energy chiefly, because when I am happy I have a surfeit of it and am fit to battle disease. I feel as if my body is shutting down all its systems. My food money runs out next week on.

What’s the point, my brother, what’s the point? I re-read all your letters, my true brother, and was reduced to tears. You loved me then more than you do now, but what good is love to me when my own parents, my own flesh and blood despise me? My own parents whom I have only tried to please. You are far, far away and can’t help anyway, except to love. I wait every day for some word of you – perhaps when he leaves Holland, perhaps. You didn’t send me a Dutch address, which I accept and understand perfectly. I love you. I hope life has been far kinder to you (not that I doubt it has). Don’t let the parting weigh too heavy on your soul – appreciate what you do have, it’s far more than many others.

It’s for the sake of THAK that I suffer this, but at the moment the love that binds me to him is more of a hysteria. I pay his fare through on the bus every day, as I can’t bear the journey on my own (until now – though he’s catching the bus at 10.40 and will meet me at one). I am distraught when he’s not there, in my own way. Which is expressed by weeping bitterly one minute and laughing uncontrollably the next. I fear even going to buy myself a coffee at the University restaurant. I feel as if I am being stared at, for I am poorly dressed and fat and have no make-up, only a plastic carrier for my books.

It’s all hell. But you must know that I love you in the full way I explained right at the very start. You cannot force this love into a “mere” spiritual category and if, as Rob puts it, THAK is nothing more than a substitute for you then it’s my tough shit, isn’t it? Standing on one’s own two feet is impossible here. I don’t write dramatic suicide notes. The only thing that worries me is the pain of one and a half feet of steel slicing through my internal organs. What a petty fear to bind me to this infernal life.

You mustn’t be angry with me for these words, for still loving you. I’m not entirely stupid: like I said, it’s my own hardened excrement. We’re in E now, so I have to stop soon. I have learned the lesson of your “Stop waiting for a knight in shining armour”, so I hitched on to the back of Albert Auldstick’s donkey. Albert Auldstick: wizard, sword-wielder, martial arts expert.

I have not managed to escape. Simple words, momentous (for me) in meaning.

I could take delight in the beauty of simple things: my sparrows in their dust bath. Perhaps life itself (pah!),

Your ever-loving sister.

THAK was a self-confessed pyromaniac. When walking on hillsides, his favourite occupation was to seek out a dry gorse or broom bush and set it alight. He always carried a pack of Swan Vestas, just in case. When he was flush, he took his pocket camera along as well, complete with new roll of film to immortalise the event for future delectation. The proudest moment of his career was when he succeeded in burning an abandoned scout hut to the ground. As the flames licked along the rafters, he stood inside, admiring his handiwork, the paint-fume laden smoke eventually driving him into the fresh air.

He had been brought up by his grandparents as relations with his mother had never been cordial. Sick of the constant career-necessitated moves from Nigeria (the Biafran War prompting their evacuation) to Croydon (his father, an architect, had been part of the team that designed the Barbican), the anonymity of the city of P appealed to him. In her latter years, his grandmother, hollowed out by years of electro-shock therapy, was confined to a nursing home. Having lost all five brothers in the Great War, his grandfather (whom THAK nicknamed “Trumpet”, an abbreviation of ear trumpet, alluding to his deafness) had briefly flirted with trying his luck in the States, moving to Chicago during the Capone era. On return, he finally settled for a safe livelihood option in the Gas Board, but the taste for stocks and shares he had acquired in the land of ticker tape and skyscrapers emboldened him to make several highly profitable investments. THAK knew that he had been included in the will for half of the overall amount, the old man (typically for his generation) less generous towards his sister. To the end of his days he dug his borders without planting anything in them and fed the daily pigeon callers on his window sill (many of his friends raced the birds, a hobby, which fascinated him, although he only enjoyed it by proxy), pottering about in his garden shed, radio full blast.

THAK lived in a monastically sparse room with an old-fashioned metal sprung bed frame. He had correctly calculated that if he could prise my virginity from me, he would probably prevail in the contest over my favours with CC. What cemented us together was a blend of opposition from our elders, resentment against the world at large for refusing to recognise our respective talents, keeping us at the bottom of the pile and my absolute conviction concerning his artistic gifts. The level of detail in his drawings can only be appreciated when viewed with a magnifying glass, which is how they were created. He thought nothing of spending years on a single piece. Vasa-inspired sailing ships, lost temples, haughty goddesses. Having not been given much by way of formal training (art classes at secondary school), his work left me astounded. The two paintings I purchased from him for £1,500 apiece, “Demeter” and “Autumn”, gather dust in my study, unstretched. I sacrificed many years to encouraging him, but it proved a thankless task. The frustration I felt in failing to induce him to pull himself together (combined with his callous attitude towards G) gradually drove us apart. He gorges on the self-pity of remaining undiscovered, it constitutes his creative fuel. Were we to swap bodies, I would have exhibited in every major gallery, selling my canvases for obscene sums. He, by contrast, contents himself with the weekly handout from social security while he bides his time waiting for the inheritance from his father (although, since his mother’s death, THAK’s prospects of a large settlement have considerably dwindled, his father having found love with a women of less substantial means, as THAK sneeringly put it – to the best of my knowledge the loch-side island estate has been sold off to fund exotic travel, an irony, which I confess amuses me). He keeps his sketches and plans for his mausoleum in a large folder, his flat cluttered with sculptures (for example, two slender art nouveau-like female figures in plaster coated with aluminium powder to yield a perfect, silver finish). The progenitor mice, Empress Ditha Bowtie and her short-lived consort Jessie, are sealed in oil-filled tombs in elaborate temples erected to commemorate their dynasty, complete with water gardens. I do not know whether he has moved or still shares the ample attic apartments with his sexually inept film museum projectionist acquaintance. After having taken up semi-permanent residence in Waffleland I persisted in the ritual of weekly calls (he was my fall back option) for several years, cruelly stringing him along. He never once picked up the phone by way of reciprocation himself, one of the many shortcomings that irritated me beyond measure.

Following eviction by my parents, THAK and I signed a lease with “the Sybil” on a cramped property in Albion Road. For a research student the rent was steep, instantly gobbling up a large chunk of my grant (our cohabitation disqualifying him from his usual level of benefits, thereby increasing our misery – since we were not married, I was not entitled to extra in spite of supporting him), but the relentless approach of the appointed deadline left us little choice. The flat was situated on the first floor with a limited view from the double bedroom over garages and Calton Hill with its unfinished memorial, a flat asphalt roof level with the bottom of our window covering the extension to the bakery below. We draped the Japanese war flag with its angry rays over the glass section of the door to block the view into our private sanctuary. The plastic fish tanks housing the gender-segregated mice were placed against the wall on the badly-fitted bulging carpet. In the hallway, a telephone we could not afford to connect was fitted to the wall (one morning, however, it mysteriously rang, a wrong number. Some error at the exchange had activated it and I seized the opportunity to contact my parents from the comfort of indoors, the floors of call boxes in the neighbourhood corroded by stagnant puddles of urine and vomit).

Our only source of heat came from a coin-meter greedy single-bar electric fire. In an effort to reduce consumption to a minimum we spent the days away from home. I pursued my studies in the merciful tranquillity of the National Library’s reading room whilst THAK sat scribbling ideas for his various novels (vicious, compensatory revenge yarns whose victims were drawn from the ranks of “OK Yahs” that breed of inordinately self-confident English student who dominated undergraduate tutorials with their dreary monologues, reserving a witheringly patronising contempt for the natives of Scotia’s heather-clad slopes – in one of his stories, a sewer-dwelling abomination dragged them through open condies to their excruciating demise by dismemberment) on A4 pads in the University library’s basement café, which could be entered without holding up a matriculation card for scrutiny. Oblivious to the swelling and subsiding queues at peak and quiet hours, he sipped a single cup of milky coffee, discipline never flagging at the sight of leftover crusts and goodies deposited on the low formica tables.

All night long, the bread-kneading and cake-mixing machinery relentlessly throbbed away. We joked that it was like living above the engine room of the Titanic. Once we were jolted awake by the sound of scuffing and chattering on the roof. On peeping through a cautious chink in the curtains our eyes were assailed by the spectacle of uniformed fire brigade officers, yellow helmets and all, hacking at the bitumen in an attempt to prevent the sneaking progress of the tongues of flame.

A mist of flour dust greeted us each morning, unidentifiable green slime oozed from the bathroom taps, hanging in vile glassy-onion strings until the water pressure forced it down the plughole.

The Sybil had conveniently neglected to inform us of her intention to install a third party in the spare bedroom to boost her income. We fell out when the unwelcome newcomer sub-let to his girlfriend who took it upon herself to remove our margarine tubs, milk, eggs, bread and other sundry perishables from the fridge, repacking it in such a fashion as to give them the bulk of the available space. Having already surrendered the living room to them we could compromise no further. The atmosphere deteriorated to such an extent that they eventually decided to cut their losses and move out. The Sybil’s displeasure at their departure was translated into a massive rent increase (£250 to £500 from one month to the next), the simplest and most effective means of forcing us out. In desperation, THAK paid a visit to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, which informed him that whereas adjustments to keep pace with inflation were legal, arbitrary hikes of the type we were being exposed to were most decidedly not. We were encouraged to submit our case to the Fair Rent Officer whose decision was binding. Our adversary was to be represented by her firm of solicitors. They made the fatal mistake of assuming both that we would be ill-educated, ill-prepared and inarticulate and that the authority appointee would be unsympathetic towards our plight. The junior dogsbody they sent along neither a match for my slicing intellect nor was he up to speed on the details of the dossier. I ran rings around him as he dabbed at the sweat on his forehead. His pompous name (D. Grainger Brash), posh accent and immaculately creased trouser legs a red rag to unleash my pent-up wrath. Although he would not accept the nuisance of the Saturday afternoon scarf-wrapped football match crowds we regularly had to wade through on our journey homeward as an argument (in spite of having raised the issue himself), the Officer finally arrived at the figure of £125 as the appropriate installment (£90 for the occupant of the single bedroom). Our victory was so sweet we almost skipped along Princes Street. George, the replacement lodger in the spare room, kept himself to himself. We only ever heard him as he slipped discretely out through the front door armed with snooker cue.

In the utter penury that ensued once the cheque had cleared (I had indeed been compelled to fork out the ludicrously inflated higher amount whilst waiting for an appointment to resolve the dispute) our euphoria evaporated: we were confronted with the bleak alternative of either settling the electric bill or eating. I recall HP’s fond reminiscences: “My Mum cooked us porridge every day for breakfast. Thick and lumpy with golden syrup and milk. We hated it. Looking back on it now, she was probably right: it was warm and cheap and filling, good for winter. But we hated it anyway”. The great Scotland-England divide: we look down on them for their effete habit of sweetening their bowl of soluble fibre rich oats, preferring to add salt. The blue Cerebos tube, a boy pursuing a distressed chick, pouring the white granules over it. Even the denatured sugary variety was not as bad as the bland pap of Ready Brek, advertised as insulation against the cold, school pupils emitting an orange-red aura, a protective barrier in the playground. Our affordable luxury pudding broke with the native tradition, the excuse being that it was a dessert as opposed to early morning fare: chocolate porridge. Stir in a few tablespoons of cocoa powder and cinnamon, pour on double cream and serve. We had to be inventive to survive. Regular customers at Super Scoop, a passing retail fad where you shovelled oats, sugar and breakfast cereals into bags for weighing we chatted to the owner, a trim, auburn-haired woman in her mid-thirties. She quickly learned to pull down the metal shutters as the chanting swelled and the clatter of hooves announced the arrival of mounted police to keep the fans under control on their way to the stadium. Emerging from the stairwell after a match, the pavements glittered with the shards of broken bottles, ring pulls and soggy chip bags.

For a treat we would visit the kebab shop for pita bread stuffed with grated carrot, cabbage (a vegetable for which we devised the proverbial 101 recipes) and onion, completed by a generous ladling of fire-extinguisher tomato and chilli sauce. I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian, my self-devised substitute religion, a variant on pantheism, founded on the belief that blood, as the carrier of life, was sacred and its ingestion inherently destructive. Grimly determined to prove myself pure (in an effort to draw the venom out of the condemnations of my born-again friends still trapped in the fellowship, frustrating their predictions that I was destined to rot in hell for all eternity by demonstrating their own weakness to them, my moral conduct would be exemplary) I purchased a guide to e-numbers, checking every label for animal-based additives before placing a product in my shopping basket. No cheese unless manufactured with rennet from a source other than a calf’s stomach. No restaurant food unless I knew what type of oil it had been fried in. No leather items, my feet clad in trainers. McVities Digestive (with the green V “suitable for vegetarians”) spread with butter my staple to stave off mid-afternoon hunger.

Once I had definitively overcome the need for faith (through the study of Durkheim and my subsequent conversion to the sociological mode of reasoning spiced with a healthy dash of feminism) the exclusion of meat and fish from my diet lost its spiritually purgative effect, but I continued to adhere to the restriction. Carnivores smelt different: their breath had the nausea-inducing stench of death about it, as strong and stubborn as the cling of cigarette smoke to the hair on exiting a pub. Dr. P’s advice prompted my return to the forbidden pleasures of bacon fat and chicken thighs. She attacked my weak point: G’s welfare: an iron deficiency would be detrimental to his normal intellectual development. The following day, I ate a chicken sandwich (beef remains resolutely banished from my plate, not because the sight of hanging carcasses in the back of a butcher’s van revolts me – which it does – nor because of the BSE scandal, but because the deep red ooze when the knife slices into a slab of medium-rare propels the bile into my throat, gone forever are the days when I tucked into mince and tatties or the rare delicacy of fillet steak), feeding my infant son with some concoction from a jar containing protein of an origin he had never tasted. His stomach has always been delicate, colic regularly disturbing my sleep and that of my ageing spinster neighbour immediately below when we lived in the top floor flat, our first dwelling in Waffleland (regardless of the hour, she would thump on her ceiling with a broom to indicate her displeasure, continually threatening to call the police since “Small babies only howl when they are being abused”), but that night his face was beetroot red, his little legs pulled up to his chest, inconsolable. I too was doubled up with pain in imitation of the foetal huddle, having lost the flora in my gut to aid digestion. Ironically, G’s occasional bouts of constipation (necessitating two dashes to casualty in the middle of the night with suspected appendicitis) stem from his point-blank refusal to grace his fork with broccoli, sprouts or any other green, not to mention salad ingredients, such as tomato or lettuce.

We combed the gutters by the parking meters for dropped coins. Our most substantial windfall was of several pound notes blowing along the pavement near Teviot Row. The tramps who waddled through the railway station in their multiple layers of clothing, sticking their grimy, nicotine-stained fingers into the coin box slots (a rare sight in these latter card-dominated days) for forgotten change never suspected that our famished gaze might have been attracted by a desire to pick up money-scavenging tips. Although they could have done little to ease our wretched predicament, my parents cherished a forlorn hope that the “lame duck” (their most charitable designation for THAK) would finally be goaded into seeking a job. His sole experience of the world of toil had been on a YTS placement where he was assigned to an archaeological dig to record soil layers and finds in accurate scale drawings. No such openings were available in the capital, however. In the meantime, one of my supervisors (with whom I am still in touch) took pity on me, organising weekly conversation sessions for “brushing up” her spoken German (not that she actually had the slightest need of them). The fee she insisted on a princely £10 an hour, enough to alleviate our distress. She dismissed my embarrassment about accepting so much with a reassurance that as a proud “Dinkie” (“Double income, no kids”) it did not impose too great a strain on her budget.

The “Mouse”oleum

[To AL, 26th August, 1986]

Marchmont

Row upon row of high sandstone houses, bay windows, yucca plants and old ladies permanently in their Sunday best. Wide, wide streets lined with parked cars, the small shops squeezed out of the centre and the smell of the brewery that fills the air wherever you walk. A few students here and there. The silence interrupted by the occasional passing vehicle. Unhurried. A warm atmosphere of life and living and lived-in-ness, a habitation for over a century, each stairway with front and back gardens. “For Sale” signs in assorted windows, secret rumours of subsidence. Staring from the window, watching the throb of others, the orange-red of sunset glowing on the wallpaper behind the piano. Silence. A boy fingers the coins meant for fish and chips. Artificial light compensates for the retreat of the sun. Friday night click of high heels, couples wandering past in the direction of the town. Strains of “Madame Butterfly”. Breathing into the stone, soaking up memories. Melancholy, longing, tearful farewells, eternal waiting.

Down to the park, to the whale’s jawbone that arches over the walkway, the avenues of cherry trees, interlaced branches, breathing pink of May, a ceiling of blossoms. Green meadows, green benches, litter bins, a ceaseless stream of joggers and dog-walkers. The arterial path: weathered oaks soaring to the heights where the owls nest, hooting in the twilight. The blue tits that sport for breadcrumbs, consummate skill on show, a perfection of flight. The finch that comes when I call, appearing without fail whenever it sees me. The squirrels cursing at schoolboys from the branches and cautiously nibble from snacks held in outstretched hand. The railings of the hospital, black-coated iron. Bicycle path. The university library, vast monster of stone and glass, thousands upon thousands of words, statements, facts, opinions, arguments stored away. The medical school and the pub opposite (above the entrance “Time for Medicine” enticing in the weary anatomists after a day’s dissection). The statue of the little terrier who attended his master’s grave every day for fourteen years until he himself was laid to rest, the symbol and spirit of this great city. Snapshotting tourists posing for smiles. The Underworld’s lower level, opulent and stinking. A mission refuge for tramps, alternative theatre, dresses for queens and fairy princesses stuffed into display windows without price tags beneath gold-lettered signs. Antiques at every turn. Fashions of the past in musty doorways, transistors blaring disco hits to drown out the flow of obscenities from the pavement-bound wino. And, high above all, this ancient rock, the inevitable, inescapable castle, silently surveying, keeping watch for an enemy who visits its ramparts in jeans and T-shirt every day for the guided tour, boosting the economy. Up to the crowd, the interminable throng, pushing, shoving, laughing, chattering in unknown tongues. Every stone whispers a historical volume in the haunt of kings and queens. The suffocation of it all. Carefully integrated restaurants. A heart fashioned from paving stones, bad omen, to step on it a curse averted only by a hasty spit. Vaulted ceilings of the cathedral, gothic joy – walls of stained glass, a gilded eagle, wings spread to bear the scripture’s weight, through the heavy door to the holy of holies, the chapel of the knights carved out in wood, a place to lay down the sword. Coats of arms, nobility. The altar with its Lamb of God – serene, perfect.