Highlights from all books

I took a deep breath, picked up the receiver and said our number. I can say that without stammering, at least. Usually.

But the person on the other end didn’t answer.

‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello?’

They breathed in like they’d cut themselves on paper.

‘Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.’

Very faint, I recognized the Sesame Street music.

‘If you can hear me,’ I remembered a Children’s Film Foundation film where this happened, ‘tap the phone, once.’

There was no tap, just more Sesame Street.

‘You might have the wrong number,’ I said, wondering.

A baby began wailing and the receiver was slammed down.

When people listen they make a listening noise.

I’d heard it, so they’d heard me.

Moron’s my height and he’s okay but Jesus he pongs of gravy. Moron wears ankle-flappers from charity shops and lives down Drugger’s End in a brick cottage that pongs of gravy too. His real name’s Dean Moran (rhymes with ‘warren’) but our PE teacher Mr Carver started calling him ‘Moron’ in our first week and it’s stuck. I call him ‘Dean’ if we’re on our own but names aren’t just names. Kids who’re really popular get called by their first names, so Nick Yew’s always just ‘Nick’. Kids who’re a bit popular like Gilbert Swinyard have sort of respectful nicknames like ‘Yardy’. Next down are kids like me who call each other by our surnames. Below us are kids with piss-take nicknames like Moran Moron or Nicholas Briar who’s Knickerless Bra. It’s all ranks, being a boy, like the army. If I called Gilbert Swinyard, just ‘Swinyard’ he’d kick my face in. Or if I called Moron ‘Dean’ in front of everyone, it’d damage my own standing. So you’ve got to watch out.

The scrit-scrat’s uncoiling. Louder, waspier, daggerier.

Her windpipe bulges as her soul squeezes out of her heart.

Her worn-out eyes flip awake like a doll’s, black, glassy, shocked.

From her black crack mouth, a blizzard rushes out.

A silent roaring hangs here.

Not going anywhere.

It must’ve been around then (maybe that same afternoon) that my stammer took on the appearance of a hangman. Pike lips, broken nose, rhino cheeks, red eyes ’cause he never sleeps. I imagine him in the baby room at Preston Hospital playing Eeny-meeny-miny-mo. I imagine him tapping my koochy lips, murmuring down at me, Mine. But it’s his hands, not his face, that I really feel him by. His snaky fingers that sink inside my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing’ll work. Words beginning with ‘N’ have always been one of Hangman’s favourites. When I was nine I dreaded people asking me ‘How old are you?’ In the end I’d hold up nine fingers like I was being dead witty but I know the other person’d be thinking, Why didn’t he just tell me, the twat? Hangman used to like Y-words, too, but lately he’s eased off those and has moved to S-words. This is bad news. Look at any dictionary and see which section’s the thickest: it’s S. Twenty million words begin with N or S. Apart from the Russians starting a nuclear war, my biggest fear is if Hangman gets interested in J-words, ’cause then I won’t even be able to say my own name. I’d have to change my name by deed-poll, but Dad’d never let me.

That’s the question. My answer is, it depends. Speech therapy is as imperfect a science, Jason, as speaking is a complex one. There are seventy-two muscles involved in the production of human speech. The neural connections my brain is employing now, to say this sentence to you, number in the tens of millions. Little wonder one study put the percentage of people with some kind of speech disorder at twelve per cent. Don’t put your faith in a miracle cure. In the vast majority of cases, progress doesn’t come from trying to kill a speech defect. Try to will it out of existence, it’ll just will itself back stronger. Right? No, it’s a question – and this might sound nutty – of understanding it, of coming to a working accommodation with it, of respecting it, of not fearing it. Yis, it’ll flare up from time to time, but if you know why it flares, you’ll know how to douse what makes it flare up. Back in Durban I had a friend who’d once been an alcoholic. One day I asked him how he’d cured himself. My friend said he’d done no such thing. I said, “What do you mean? You haven’t touched a drop in three years!” He said all he’d done was become a teetotal alcoholic. That’s my goal. To help people change from being stammering stammerers into non-stammering stammerers.’

Stammerers can’t win arguments ’cause once you stammer, H-h-hey p-p-presto, you’ve l-l-lost, S-s-st-st-utterboy! If I stammer with Dad, he gets that face he had when he got his Black and Decker Workmate home and found it was minus a crucial packet of screws. Hangman just loves that face.

People see stammerers on TV who’re forced, one magic day, to go on stage in front of a thousand people and lo and behold a perfect voice flows out. See, everyone smiles, he had it in him all along! All he needed was a friendly push! Now he’s cured. But that’s such utter bollocks. If it ever actually happens it’s just Hangman obeying the First Commandment. Just go back and check up on that ‘cured’ stammerer one week later. You’ll see. The truth is, deep ends cause drowning. Baptisms of fire cause third-degree burns.

Mrs Thatcher frazzled this twerpy prat in a bow tie on BBC1 this evening. He was saying sinking the General Belgrano outside the Total Exclusion Zone was morally and legally wrong. (Actually we sank the Belgrano some days ago but the papers’ve just got hold of the pictures and since the Sheffield we’ve got zero sympathy for the Argie bastards.) Mrs Thatcher fixed her stained-glass blue eyes on that pillock and pointed out that the enemy cruiser’d been zigzagging in and out of the zone all day. She said something like, ‘The fathers and mothers of our country did not elect me the Prime Minister of this country to gamble with the lives of their sons over questions of legal niceties. Must I remind you that we are a country at war?’ The whole studio cheered and the whole country cheered too, I reckon, ’cept for Michael Foot and Red Ken Livingstone and Anthony Wedgwood Benn and all those Loony Lefties. Mrs Thatcher’s bloody ace. She’s so strong, so calm, so sure. Loads more use than the Queen, who hasn’t said a dickie-bird since the war began. Some countries like Spain are saying we shouldn’t’ve fired on the Belgrano, but the only reason so many Argies drowned was that the other ships in its convoy scarpered off instead of saving their own men. Our Royal Navy’d never ever ever leave Britons to drown like that. And anyway, when you join the army or navy in any country, you’re paid to risk your life. Like Tom Yew. Now Galtieri is trying to get us back to the negotiating table, but Maggie’s told him the only thing she’ll discuss is the United Nations’ Resolution 502. Argentina’s unconditional withdrawal from British soil. Some Argie diplomat in New York, still harping on about the Belgrano being outside the zone, said Britain no longer rules the waves, it just waives the rules. The Daily Mail says it’s typical of a tinpot Latin paper-pusher to make stupid quips about life and death. The Daily Mail says the Argies should’ve thought about the consequences before they stuck their poxy blue-and-white flag on our sovereign colony. The Daily Mail’s dead right. The Daily Mail says that Leopoldo Galtieri only invaded the Falklands to distract attention from all his own people he’s tortured, murdered and pushed out of helicopters over the sea. The Daily Mail’s dead right again. The Daily Mail says Galtieri’s brand of patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. The Daily Mail’s as right as Margaret Thatcher. All England’s turned into a dynamo. People are queuing up outside hospitals to donate blood. Mr Whitlock spent most of our biology lesson saying how certain patriotic young men cycled to Worcester hospital to give blood. (Everyone knows he was talking about Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley.) They were told by a nurse that they’re too young. So Mr Whitlock’s writing to Michael Spicer, our Member of Parliament, to complain that the children of England are being denied the right to contribute to the war effort. His letter’s already in the Malvern Gazetteer.

Nick Yew is a school hero ’cause of Tom. Nick said the Sheffield was just an unlucky fluke. Our anti-missile systems’ll be modified to knock out the Exocets from now on. So we should be getting our islands back pretty soon. The Sun’s paying £100 for the best anti-Argie joke. I can’t do jokes, but I’m keeping a scrapbook about the war. I’m cutting out stuff from the newspapers and magazines. Neal Brose is keeping one too. He reckons it’ll be worth a fortune twenty or thirty years from now when the Falklands War has turned into history. But all this excitement’ll never turn dusty and brown in archives and libraries. No way. People’ll remember everything about the Falklands till the end of the world.

War’s an auction where whoever can pay most in damage and still be standing wins. The news is bad. Brian Hanrahan said the landing at San Carlos Bay was the bloodiest day for the Royal Navy since the Second World War. The hills blocked our radar so we didn’t see the warplanes coming till they were right on top of us. The clear morning was a gift to the Argentinians. They attacked the main ships, not the troop transporters, ’cause once the task force is sunk, our land forces’ll be easy to pick off. HMS Ardent was sunk. HMS Brilliant is crippled. HMS Antrim and HMS Argonaut are out of the war for good. TV’s been showing the same pictures, all day. An enemy Mirage III-E sharks through a skyful of Sea Cats and Sea Wolfs and Sea Slugs. Water spouts kerboom in the bay. Black smoke pours from the hull of the Ardent. For the first time we saw the Falkland Islands themselves. Treeless, houseless, hedgeless, no colours bar greys and greens. Julia said it’s like the Hebrides and she’s right.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it’s a lottery.

Last week the Malvern Gazetteer had Tom Yew on its front page. He was smiling and saluting at the camera in his ensign’s uniform. I pasted it in my scrapbook. I’m running out of pages.

‘You said you’d “washed your hands of the whole affair”, Michael.’

‘I did, yes,’ Dad can’t hide satisfaction to save his life, ‘but I didn’t count on not being able to park my own car on my own drive. That’s all I wanted to say.’

Something silent smashed without being dropped.

Mum left the table. Not angry, and not tearful, but worse. Like none of us were there.

Dad just stared at where she’d been sitting.

‘In my exam today,’ Julia twisted a strand of her hair, ‘this term I’m not totally sure about, “pyrrhic victory”, came up. Do you know what a “pyrrhic victory” is, Dad?’

Dad gave Julia a very complicated stare.

Julia didn’t flinch.

Dad got up and went to the garage, for a smoke, most like.

The wreckage of dessert lay between me and Julia.

We watched it for a bit. ‘A what victory?’

‘“Pyrrhic”. Ancient Greece. A pyrrhic victory is one where you win, but the cost of winning is so high that it would’ve been better if you’d never bothered with the war in the first place. Useful word, isn’t it? So, Jace. Looks like we’re doing the dishes again. Wash or dry?’

The whole of Great Britain’s like it’s Bonfire Night and Christmas Day and St George’s Day and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee all rolled into one. Mrs Thatcher appeared outside 10 Downing Street, saying, ‘Rejoice! Just rejoice!’ The photographers’ flashbulbs and the crowds went crazy; she wasn’t a politician at all, but all four members of Bucks Fizz at the Eurovision Song Contest. Everyone sang ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves’, over and over. (Has that song got any verses or is it just one never-ending chorus?) This summer isn’t green, this summer is the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. Bells’ve been rung, beacons lit, street parties’ve broken out up and down the country. Isaac Pye had an all-night happy hour at the Black Swan last night. In Argentina riots’re being reported in the major cities with lootings and shootings and some people’re saying it’s just a matter of time before the junta’s toppled. The Daily Mail’s full of how Great British guts and Great British leadership won the war. No prime minister’s ever been more popular than Premier Margaret Thatcher in the entire history of opinion polls.

I should be really happy.

Julia reads the Guardian, which has got all sorts of stuff not in the Daily Mail. Most of the 30,000 enemy soldiers, she says, were just conscripts and Indians. Their elite troops all raced back to Port Stanley as the British paratroopers advanced. Some of the ones they left behind got killed by bayonets. Having your intestines pulled out through a slit in the belly! What a 1914 way to die in 1982. Brian Hanrahan said he saw one prisoner being interviewed who said they didn’t even know what the Malvinas were or why they’d been brought there. Julia says the main reasons we won were (a) the Argentinians couldn’t buy any more Exocets, (b) their navy stayed holed up in mainland bases, (c) their air force ran out of trained pilots. Julia says it would’ve been cheaper to set every Falkland Islander up with their own farm in the Cotswolds than to’ve gone to war. She reckons nobody’ll pay to clean up the mess, so that much of the farmland on the islands’ll be off limits until the mines’ve rusted.

A hundred years, that might take.

Today’s big story in the Daily Mail’s about whether Cliff Richard the singer’s having sex with Sue Barker the tennis player, or whether they’re just good friends.

Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.

People’re always buried facing west so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people’ll claw their way up and walk due west to the Throne of Jesus to be judged. From Black Swan Green that means the Throne of Jesus’ll be in Aberystwyth. Suicides, mind, get buried facing north. They won’t be able to find Jesus ’cause dead people only walk in straight lines. They’ll all end up in John o’ Groats. Aberystwyth’s a bit of a dive, but Dad says John o’ Groats’s just a few houses where Scotland runs out of Scotland...

I realize something about all the suicides traipsing north, north, north to a nowhere place where the highlands melt into the sea.

It’s not a curse, or a punishment.

It’s what they want.

‘My name is Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck.’ If a peacock had a human voice, that’d be hers.

‘This is the vicarage, right?’ I showed her my invitation, uneasy now. ‘It says so on your gatepost. On the main road.’

‘Ah.’ Madame Crommelynck nodded. ‘Vicar, vicarage. You miscomprehend a thing. A vicar lived here once upon a time, doubtless – before him two vicars, three vicars, many vicars’ – her scrawny hand mimed a poof of smoke – ‘but no more. The Anglican Church becomes bankrupter and bankrupter, year by year, like British Leyland cars. My father said, Catholics know how to run the business of religion. Catholics and Mormons. Propagate customers, they tell their congregation, or is the inferno for you! But your Church of England, no. Consequences is, these enchantible rectory houses are sold or rented, and vicars must move to little houses. Only the name “vicarage” is remaining.’

‘But,’ I swallowed, ‘I’ve been posting my poems through your letter box since January. How come they’re printed in the parish magazine every month?’

‘This,’ Madame Crommelynck took such a mighty drag on her cigarette I could see it shrink, ‘should be no mystery to an agile brain. I deliver your poems to the real vicar in his real vicarage. An ugly bungalow near Hanley Castle. I do not charge you for this service. Is gratis. Is a fine exercise for my not-agile bones. But in payment, I read your poems first.’

‘Oh. Does the real vicar know?’

‘I too make my deliveries in darkness, anonymous, so I am not apprehended by the vicar’s wife – oh, she is an hundred times worst than he is. An harpy of tattle-tittle. She asked to use my garden for her St Gabriel’s Summer Fête! “It is tradition,” says Mrs Vicar. “We need space for the human bridge. For the stalls.” I tell her, “Go to the hell! I pay you rent, do I not? Who has need of a divine creator who must sell inferior marmalade?”’ Madame Crommelynck smacked her leathery lips. ‘But at least, her husband publishes your poems in his funny magazine. Perhaps he is redeemable.’ She gestured at a bottle of wine stood on a pearly table. ‘You will drink a little?’

Madame Crommelynck did a tiny growl. ‘You imagine blank verse is a liberation, but no. Discard rhyme, you discard a parachute…Sentimentality you mistake for emotion…You love words, yes’ (a pride-bubble swelled up in me) ‘but your words are still the master of you, you are not yet master of them…’ (The bubble popped.) She studied my reaction. ‘But, at least, your poem is robust enough to be criticized. Most so-called poems disintegrate at one touch. Your imagery is here, there, fresh, I am not ashamed to call it so. Now I wish to know a thing.’

‘Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Your “sort of” is annoying. A yes, or a no, or a qualification, please. “Sort of” is an idle loubard, an ignorant vandale. “Sort of” says, “I am ashamed by clarity and precision.” So we try again. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it is not a poem. I am right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. Idiots labour in this misconception. Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue. Here—’ She read from the fifth verse. ‘“Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon”. The poem has a terminal deflation. Ffffffffft! Dead tyre. Automobile accident. It says, “Am I not a pretty pretty?” I answer, “Go to the hell!” If you have a magnolia in a courtyard, do you paint its flowers? Affix the flashy-flashy Christmas lights? Attach plastic parrots? No. You do not.’

What she said sounded true, but…

‘You think,’ Madame Crommelynck snorted smoke, ‘“This old witch is crazy! A magnolia tree exists already. Magnolias do not need poets to exist. In the case of a poem, a poem, I must create it.”’

I nodded. (I would’ve thought that if I’d had a few minutes.)

‘You must say what you think, or else spend your Saturday with your head in a bucket and not in conversation with me. You understand?’

‘Good. I reply, verse is “made”. But the word “make” is unsufficient for a true poem. “Create” is unsufficient. All words are unsufficient. Because of this. The poem exists before it is written.’

That, I didn’t get. ‘Where?’

‘T. S. Eliot expresses it so – the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art,’ she put another cigarette in her mouth and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter, ‘fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if its themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, clichés of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What is beauty?’

Madame Crommelynck tapped cigarette ash into a ruby blobby ashtray.

‘Beauty’s…’

She relished my stumpedness. I wanted to impress her with a clever definition, but I kept crashing into beauty’s something that’s beautiful.

Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Ridout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize ‘I Must Go Down to the Seas Again’ by John Masefield. We don’t have to actually think about stuff.

I admitted, ‘It’s difficult.’

‘Difficult?’ (Her ashtray was in the shape of a curled girl, I saw.) ‘Impossible! Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old café, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.’

‘But…’ I hesitated, wondering if I should say this.

‘My one demand,’ she said, ‘is you say what you think!’

‘You just chose natural things. How about paintings, or music. We say, “The potter makes a beautiful vase.” Don’t we?’

‘We say, we say. Be careful of say. Words say, “You have labelled this abstract, this concept, therefore you have captured it.” No. They lie. Or not lie, but are maladroit. Clumsy. Your potter has made the vase, yes, but has not made the beauty. Only an object where it resides. Until the vase is dropped and breaks. Who is the ultimate fate of every vase.’

‘But,’ I still wasn’t satisfied, ‘surely some people, somewhere know what beauty is? At a university?’

‘University?’ She made a noise that might’ve been laughter. ‘Imponderables are ponderable, but answerable, no. Ask a philosopher, but be cautious. If you hear, “Eureka!”, if you think, “His answer has captured my question!”, then here is proof he is a counterfeit. If your philosopher has truly left Plato’s cave, if he has stared into that sun of the blind…’ She counted the three possibilities on her fingers. ‘He is lunatic, or his answers are questions who is only masquerading as answers, or he is silent. Silent because you can know or you can say, but both, no. My glass is empty.’

The last drops were the thickest.

‘Are you a poet?’ (I’d nearly said ‘too’.)

‘No. That title is hazardous. But, I had intimacy with poets when I was young. Robert Graves wrote a poem of me. Not his best. William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and,’ she uttered the word like a pantomime witch, ‘“elope”! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as…épouvantail, a – how you say the man in a field who frights birds?’

‘Scarecrow?’

‘Scarecrow. Exactly. So I tell him, “Go to the hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!” He consented my logic. Poets are listeners, if they are not intoxicated. But novelists,’ Madame Crommelynck did a yuck face, ‘is schizoids, lunatics, liars. Henry Miller stayed in our colony in Taormina. A pig, a perspiring pig, and Hemingway, you know?’

I’d heard of him so I nodded.

‘Lecherousest pig in the entire farm! Cinematographers? Fffffft. Petits Zeus of their universes. The world is their own film set. Charles Chaplin also, he was my neighbour in Geneva, across the lake. A charming petit Zeus, but a petit Zeus. Painters? Squeeze their hearts dry to make the pigments. No heart remains for people. Look at that Andalusian goat, Picasso. His biographers come for my stories of him, beg, offer money, but I tell them, “Go to the hell, I am not an human juke box. Composers? My father was one. Vyvyan Ayrs. His ears was burnt with his music. I, or my mother, he rarely listened. Formidable in his generation, but now he is fallen from the repertory. He exiled at Zedelghem, south of Bruges. My mother’s estate was there. My native tongue is Flemish. So you hear, English is not an adroit tongue for me, too many – lesses and – lessnesses. You think I am French?’

I nodded.

‘Belgian. The destiny of discreet neighbours is to be confused with the noisy ones next door. See an animal! On the lawn. By the geraniums…’

The stylus-arm clunked in its cradle. ‘The inconsolable,’ Madame Crommelynck said, ‘is so consoling.’ She didn’t look very pleased to see me. ‘What is that advertisement you are wearing on your chest?’

‘What advertisement?’

‘That advertisement on your sweater!’

‘This is my Liverpool FC top. I’ve supported them since I was five.’

‘What signifies “HITACHI”?’

‘The FA’ve changed the rules so football teams can wear sponsors’ logos. Hitachi’s an electronics firm. From Hong Kong, I think.’

‘So you pay an organization to be their advertisement? Allons donc. In clothes, in cuisine, the English have an irresistible urge to self-mutilation. But today you are late.’

‘Always pour so the label is visible! If the wine is good, your drinker should know so. If the wine is bad, you deserve shame.’

‘Jay who? Pronounce it clearly! My ears are as old as me! I do not have microphones hidden to collect every little word!’

I hated my name. ‘Jason Taylor.’ Flavourless as chewed receipts.

‘If you are an “Adolf Coffin”, or a “Pius Broomhead”, I comprehend. But why hide “Jason Taylor” under an inaccessible symbolist and a Latin American revolutionary?’

My huh? must’ve shown.

‘Eliot! T. S.! Bolívar! Simón!’

‘“Eliot Bolivar” just sounded more…poetic.’

‘What is more poetic than ‘Jason’, an Hellenic hero? Who foundationed European literature if not the Ancient Greeks? Not Eliot’s coterie of thiefs of graves, I assure you! And what is a poet if he is not a tailor of words? Poets and tailors join what nobody else can join. Poets and tailors conceal their craft in their craft. No, I do not accept your answer. I believe the truth is, you use your pseudonym because your poetry is a shameful secret. I am correct?’

‘If your dad’s a famous composer, and your mum’s an aristocrat, you can do things that you can’t do if your dad works at Greenland Supermarkets and if you go to a comprehensive school. Poetry’s one of those things.’

‘Aha! Truth! You are afraid the hairy barbarians will not accept you in their tribe if you write poetry.’

‘That’s more or less it, yeah…’

‘More? Or less? Which is the exact word, exactly?’

(She’s a pain sometimes.) ‘That’s it. Exactly.’

‘And you wish to become an hairy barbarian?’

‘I’m a kid. I’m thirteen. You said it’s a miserable age, being thirteen, and you’re right. If you don’t fit in, they make your life a misery. Like Floyd Chaceley or Nicholas Briar.’

‘Now you are talking like a real poet.’

‘I don’t understand it when you say stuff like that!’

(Mum’d’ve gone, Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice!)

‘I mean,’ Madame Crommelynck almost looked pleased, ‘you are entirely of your words.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You are being quintessentially truthful.’

‘Anyone can be truthful.’

‘About superficialities, Jason, yes, is easy. About pain, no, is not. So you want a double life. One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar who seeks approval of the literary world.’

‘Is that so impossible?’

‘If you wish to be a versifier,’ she whirlpooled her wine, ‘very possible. If you are a true artist,’ she schwurked wine round her mouth, ‘absolutely never. If you are not truthful to the world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falsenesses.’

‘True poetry is truth. Truth is not popular, so poetry also is not.’

‘But…truth about what?’

‘Oh, the life, the death, the heart, memory, time, cats, fear. Anything.’ (The butler didn’t seem to be answering the phone either.) ‘Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees, even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and worst, television. Despicable machine. Television was here in my solarium. When I arrived. I throwed it in the cellar. It was watching me. A poet throws all but truth in the cellar. Jason. There is a matter?’

‘Er…your phone’s ringing.’

‘I know a phone is ringing! It can go to the hell! I am talking to you!’ (My parents’d run into a burning asbestos mine if they thought there was a phone in there ringing for them.) ‘One week before, we agreed “What is beauty?” is a question unanswerable, yes? So today, a greater mystery. If an art is true, if an art is free of falsenesses, it is, a priori, beautiful.’

I lay back on the armless sofa. I’ve never listened to music lying down. Listening’s reading if you close your eyes.

Music’s a wood you walk through.

‘“Europeans”? England is now drifted to the Caribbean? Are you African? Antarctican? You are European, you illiterate monkey of puberty!

Picked-on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on. Stammerers act invisible to reduce the chances of being made to say something we can’t. Kids whose parents argue act invisible in case we trigger another skirmish. The Triple Invisible Boy, that’s Jason Taylor. Even I don’t see the real Jason Taylor much these days, ’cept for when we’re writing a poem, or occasionally in a mirror, or just before sleep. But he comes out in woods. Ankley branches, knuckly roots, paths that only might be, earthworks by badgers or Romans, a pond that’ll ice over come January, a wooden cigar box nailed behind the ear of a secret sycamore where we once planned a tree house, birdstuffedtwigsnapped silence, toothy bracken, and places you can’t find if you’re not alone. Time in woods’s older than time in clocks, and truer. Ghosts of Might Be run riot in woods, and stationery shops and messes of stars. Woods don’t bother with fences or borders. Woods are fences and borders. Don’t be afraid. You see better in the dark. I’d love to work with trees. Druids don’t exist nowadays, but foresters do. A forester in France. What tree cares if you can’t spit your words out?

My OXO tin’s hidden under a loose floorboard where my bed was. I got it out for the final time and sat on my window sill. If the ravens leave the Tower of London the tower’ll fall, Miss Throckmorton told us. This OXO tin is the secret raven of 9 Kingfisher Meadows, Black Swan Green, Worcestershire. (The house won’t actually fall but a new family’ll move in and a new kid’ll claim this room as his own and never, once, think about me. Just as I’ve never once thought about who was here before us.) In the Second World War this same OXO tin went to Singapore and back with my granddad. I used to press my ear against it and listen for Chinese rickshaw pullers or Japanese Zeros or a monsoon puffing away a village on stilts. Its lid’s so tight it guffs when you open it. Granddad kept letters in it, and loose tobacco. Inside it now there’s an ammonite called Lytoceras fimbriatum, a geologist’s little hammer that used to be Dad’s, the sponge bit of my only ever cigarette, Le Grand Meaulnes in French (with Madame Crommelynck’s Christmas card from a mountain town in Patagonia not in The Times Atlas of the World, signed Mme. Crommelynck and Her Butler), Jimmy Carter’s concrete nose, a face carved out of tyre rubber, a woven wristband I nicked off the first girl I ever kissed, and the remains of an Omega Seamaster my granddad bought in Aden before I was born. Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.

“They’ll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate—

The cards and stars that tumble as they will.

Tomorrow manifests and brings the bill

For every kiss and kill, the small and great.

You want to know the future, love? Then wait:

I’ll answer your impatient questions. Still—

They’ll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate,

The cards and stars that tumble as they will.

I’ll come to you tonight, dear, when it’s late,

You will not see me; you may feel a chill.

I’ll wait until you sleep, then take my fill,

And that will be your future on a plate.

They’ll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate.”

“Mirrors are wonderful things. They appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air, that a box filled with doves and flags and spiders is actually empty, that people hidden in the wings or the pit are floating ghosts upon the stage. Angle it right and a mirror becomes a magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.

(The smoke blurs the edges of things.)”

antasy—and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another—is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

She and Gordon spoke little, except to argue the small and petty arguments of those who fear the big arguments, knowing that the only things that were left to be said were too huge to be said without destroying both their lives.

Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.

She moved a rather threadbare fur coat, which smelled badly of mothballs. Underneath it was a walking stick and a water-stained copy of Romance and Legend of Chivalry by A. R. Hope Moncrieff, priced at five pence. Next to the book, on its side, was the Holy Grail. It had a little round paper sticker on the base, and written on it, in felt pen, was the price: 30p.

The inside of the goblet was thickly coated with a brownish-red dust. Mrs. Whitaker washed it out with great care, then left it to soak for an hour in warm water with a dash of vinegar added.

The next morning was Friday; on alternate Fridays Mrs. Whitaker and Mrs. Greenberg would visit each other. Today it was Mrs. Greenberg’s turn to visit Mrs. Whitaker. They sat in the parlor and ate macaroons and drank tea. Mrs. Whitaker took one sugar in her tea, but Mrs. Greenberg took sweetener, which she always carried in her handbag in a small plastic container.

“That’s nice,” said Mrs. Greenberg, pointing to the Grail. “What is it?”

“It’s the Holy Grail,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “It’s the cup that Jesus drunk out of at the Last Supper. Later, at the Crucifixion, it caught His precious blood when the centurion’s spear pierced His side.”

Mrs. Greenberg sniffed. She was small and Jewish and didn’t hold with unsanitary things. “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, “but it’s very nice. Our Myron got one just like that when he won the swimming tournament, only it’s got his name on the side.”

“Is he still with that nice girl? The hairdresser?”

“Bernice? Oh yes. They’re thinking of getting engaged,” said Mrs. Greenberg.

When she got home, Galaad was waiting for her. He was giving the neighborhood children rides on Grizzel’s back, up and down the street.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’ve got some cases that need moving.”

She showed him up to the boxroom in the top of the house. He moved all the old suitcases for her, so she could get to the cupboard at the back.

It was very dusty up there.

She kept him up there most of the afternoon, moving things around while she dusted.

Galaad had a cut on his cheek, and he held one arm a little stiffly.

They talked a little while she dusted and tidied. Mrs. Whitaker told him about her late husband, Henry; and how the life insurance had paid the house off; and how she had all these things, but no one really to leave them to, no one but Ronald really and his wife only liked modern things. She told him how she had met Henry during the war, when he was in the ARP and she hadn’t closed the kitchen blackout curtains all the way; and about the sixpenny dances they went to in the town; and how they’d gone to London when the war had ended, and she’d had her first drink of wine.

Galaad told Mrs. Whitaker about his mother Elaine, who was flighty and no better than she should have been and something of a witch to boot; and his grandfather, King Pelles, who was well-meaning although at best a little vague; and of his youth in the Castle of Bliant on the Joyous Isle; and his father, whom he knew as “Le Chevalier Mal Fet,” who was more or less completely mad, and was in reality Lancelot du Lac, greatest of knights, in disguise and bereft of his wits; and of Galaad’s days as a young squire in Camelot.

“My lady,” he said, “This is for you, an you give me the Sangrail.”

Mrs. Whitaker picked up the stone, which was heavier than it looked, and held it up to the light. It was milkily translucent, and deep inside it flecks of silver glittered and glinted in the late-afternoon sunlight. It was warm to the touch.

Then, as she held it, a strange feeling crept over her: Deep inside she felt stillness and a sort of peace. Serenity, that was the word for it; she felt serene.

Reluctantly she put the stone back on the table.

“It’s very nice,” she said.

“That is the Philosopher’s Stone, which our forefather Noah hung in the Ark to give light when there was no light; it can transform base metals into gold; and it has certain other properties,” Galaad told her proudly. “And that isn’t all. There’s more. Here.” From the leather bag he took an egg and handed it to her.

It was the size of a goose egg and was a shiny black color, mottled with scarlet and white. When Mrs. Whitaker touched it, the hairs on the back of her neck prickled. Her immediate impression was one of incredible heat and freedom. She heard the crackling of distant fires, and for a fraction of a second she seemed to feel herself far above the world, swooping and diving on wings of flame.

She put the egg down on the table, next to the Philosopher’s Stone.

“That is the Egg of the Phoenix,” said Galaad. “From far Araby it comes. One day it will hatch out into the Phoenix Bird itself; and when its time comes, the bird will build a nest of flame, lay its egg, and die, to be reborn in flame in a later age of the world.”

“I thought that was what it was,” said Mrs. Whitaker.

“And, last of all, lady,” said Galaad, “I have brought you this.”

He drew it from his pouch, and gave it to her. It was an apple, apparently carved from a single ruby, on an amber stem.

A little nervously, she picked it up. It was soft to the touch—deceptively so: Her fingers bruised it, and ruby-colored juice from the apple ran down Mrs. Whitaker’s hand.

The kitchen filled—almost imperceptibly, magically—with the smell of summer fruit, of raspberries and peaches and strawberries and red currants. As if from a great way away she heard distant voices raised in song and far music on the air.

“It is one of the apples of the Hesperides,” said Galaad, quietly. “One bite from it will heal any illness or wound, no matter how deep; a second bite restores youth and beauty; and a third bite is said to grant eternal life.” Mrs. Whitaker licked the sticky juice from her hand. It tasted like fine wine.

There was a moment, then, when it all came back to her—how it was to be young: to have a firm, slim body that would do whatever she wanted it to do; to run down a country lane for the simple unladylike joy of running; to have men smile at her just because she was herself and happy about it.

Mrs. Whitaker looked at Sir Galaad, most comely of all knights, sitting fair and noble in her small kitchen.

She caught her breath.

“And that’s all I have brought for you,” said Galaad. “They weren’t easy to get, either.”

Mrs. Whitaker put the ruby fruit down on her kitchen table. She looked at the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Egg of the Phoenix, and the Apple of Life.

Then she walked into her parlor and looked at the mantelpiece: at the little china basset hound, and the Holy Grail, and the photograph of her late husband Henry, shirtless, smiling and eating an ice cream in black and white, almost forty years away.

She went back into the kitchen. The kettle had begun to whistle. She poured a little steaming water into the teapot, swirled it around, and poured it out. Then she added two spoonfuls of tea and one for the pot and poured in the rest of the water. All this she did in silence.

She turned to Galaad then, and she looked at him.

“Put that apple away,” she told Galaad, firmly. “You shouldn’t offer things like that to old ladies. It isn’t proper.”

Nicholas was older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves’ invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.

“I’m going to eat your life, Jack,” said the troll.

I stared the troll in the face. “My big sister is going to be coming down the path soon,” I lied, “and she’s far tastier than me. Eat her instead.”

The troll sniffed the air, and smiled. “You’re all alone,” he said. “There’s nothing else on the path. Nothing at all.” Then he leaned down, and ran his fingers over me: it felt like butterflies were brushing my face—like the touch of a blind person. Then he snuffled his fingers, and shook his huge head. “You don’t have a big sister. You’ve only a younger sister, and she’s at her friend’s today.”

“Can you tell all that from smell?” I asked, amazed.

“Trolls can smell the rainbows, trolls can smell the stars,” it whispered sadly. “Trolls can smell the dreams you dreamed before you were ever born. Come close to me and I’ll eat your life.”

He opened his mouth wide. Sharp teeth. Breath that smelled of leaf mold and the underneaths of things. “Eat. Now.”

You said you’d come back to me. And you have. Did you learn to whistle?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. I never could whistle.” It sniffed, and nodded.“I am pleased. You have grown in life and experience. More to eat. More for me.”

I turned around. The troll had gone, and the girl I had thought I loved was standing in the shadows beneath the bridge.

“We’re going home,” I told her. “Come on.”

We walked back and never said anything.

She went out with the drummer in the punk band I started, and, much later, married someone else. We met once, on a train, after she was married, and she asked me if I remembered that night.

I said I did.

“I really liked you, that night, Jack,” she told me. “I thought you were going to kiss me. I thought you were going to ask me out. I would have said yes. If you had.”

“But I didn’t.”

“No,” she said. “You didn’t.” Her hair was cut very short. It didn’t suit her.

I never saw her again. The trim woman with the taut smile was not the girl I had loved, and talking to her made me feel uncomfortable.

I stood beneath the bridge in the red brick arch, stood among the ice cream wrappers, and the crisp packets and the single, sad, used condom, and watched my breath steam in the cold afternoon air.

The blood had dried into my trousers.

Cars passed over the bridge above me; I could hear a radio playing loudly in one of them.

“Hello?” I said, quietly, feeling embarrassed, feeling foolish.

“Hello?”

There was no answer. The wind rustled the crisp packets and the leaves.

“I came back. I said I would. And I did. Hello?”

Silence.

I began to cry then, stupidly, silently, sobbing under the bridge.

A hand touched my face, and I looked up.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” said the troll.

He was my height now, but otherwise unchanged. His long gonk hair was unkempt and had leaves in it, and his eyes were wide and lonely.

I shrugged, then wiped my face with the sleeve of my coat. “I came back.”

Three kids passed above us on the bridge, shouting and running.

“I’m a troll,” whispered the troll, in a small, scared voice. “Fol rol de ol rol.” He was trembling.

I held out my hand and took his huge clawed paw in mine. I smiled at him. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Honestly. It’s okay.”

The troll nodded.

He pushed me to the ground, onto the leaves and the wrappers and the condom, and lowered himself on top of me. Then he raised his head, and opened his mouth, and ate my life with his strong sharp teeth.

When he was finished, the troll stood up and brushed himself down. He put his hand into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a bubbly, burnt lump of clinker rock.

He held it out to me.

“This is yours,” said the troll.

I looked at him: wearing my life comfortably, easily, as if he’d been wearing it for years. I took the clinker from his hand, and sniffed it. I could smell the train from which it had fallen, so long ago. I gripped it tightly in my hairy hand.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Good luck,” said the troll.

“Yeah. Well. You too.” The troll grinned with my face.

It turned its back on me and began to walk back the way I had come, toward the village, back to the empty house I had left that morning; and it whistled as it walked.

I’ve been here ever since. Hiding. Waiting. Part of the bridge. I watch from the shadows as the people pass: walking their dogs, or talking, or doing the things that people do. Sometimes people pause beneath my bridge, to stand, or piss, or make love. And I watch them, but say nothing; and they never see me.

Fol rol de ol rol.

I’m just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge.

Oh yes, I can hear you.

But I’m not coming out.

The children did not play with the Jack-in-the-Box. And when they grew up and left the great house, the attic nursery was closed up and almost forgotten.

Almost, but not entirely. For each of the children, separately, remembered walking alone in the moon’s blue light, on his or her own bare feet, up to the nursery. It was almost like sleepwalking, feet soundless on the wood of the stairs, on the threadbare nursery carpet. Remembered opening the treasure chest, pawing through the dolls and the clothes and pulling out the box.

And then the child would touch the catch, and the lid would open, slow as a sunset, and the music would begin to play, and Jack came out. Not with a pop and a bounce: he was no spring-heeled Jack. But deliberately, intently, he would rise from the box and motion to the child to come closer, closer, and smile.

And there in the moonlight, he told them each things they could never quite remember, things they were never able entirely to forget.

The oldest boy died in the Great War. The youngest, after their parents died, inherited the house, although it was taken from him when he was found in the cellar one night with cloths and paraffin and matches, trying to burn the great house to the ground. They took him to the madhouse, and perhaps he is there still.

The other children, who had once been girls and now were women, declined, each and every one, to return to the house in which they had grown up; and the windows of the house were boarded up, and the doors were all locked with huge iron keys, and the sisters visited it as often as they visited their eldest brother’s grave, or the sad thing that had once been their younger brother, which is to say, never.

Years have passed, and the girls are old women, and owls and bats have made their homes in the old attic nursery, rats build their nests among the forgotten toys. The creatures gaze uncuriously at the faded prints on the wall, and stain the remnants of the carpet with their droppings.

And deep within the box within the box, Jack waits and smiles, holding his secrets. He is waiting for the children. He can wait forever.

It was raining when I arrived in L.A., and I felt myself surrounded by a hundred old movies.

I walked out to my chalet through the rain, my overnight bag in my hand, clutching the set of keys that would, the desk clerk told me, get me through the various doors and gates. The air smelled of wet dust and, curiously enough, cough mixture. It was dusk, almost dark.

Water splashed everywhere. It ran in rills and rivulets across the courtyard. It ran into a small fishpond that jutted out from the side of a wall in the courtyard.

I walked up the stairs into a dank little room. It seemed a poor kind of a place for a star to die.

The bed seemed slightly damp, and the rain drummed a maddening beat on the air-conditioning system.

I watched a little television—the rerun wasteland: “Cheers” segued imperceptibly into “Taxi,” which flickered into black and white and became “I Love Lucy”—then stumbled into sleep.

I dreamed of drummers intermittently drumming, only thirty minutes away.

He nodded and grinned. “Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China.” We watched them swim around the little pool.

“I wonder if they get bored.”

He shook his head. “My grandson, he’s an ichthyologist, you know what that is?”

“Studies fishes.”

“Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that’s like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it’s always a surprise to them, going ‘I never been here before.’ They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, ‘Who are you, stranger?’ ”

White goldfish sliding to and fro in the water, dodging and darting through the lily pads. One of the goldfish had a crimson mark on its back that might, conceivably, have been perfectly lip-shaped: the miraculous stigmata of an almost-forgotten goddess. The gray early-morning sky was reflected in the pool.

In the theater of my dreams, a man with a beard and a baseball cap carried on a movie screen, and then he walked off-stage. The silver screen hung in the air, unsupported.

A flickery silent film began to play upon it: a woman who came out and stared down at me. It was June Lincoln who flickered on the screen, and it was June Lincoln who walked down from the screen and sat on the edge of my bed.

“Are you going to tell me not to give up?” I asked her.

On some level I knew it was a dream. I remember, dimly, understanding why this woman was a star, remember regretting that none of her films had survived.

She was indeed beautiful in my dream, despite the livid mark which went all the way around her neck.

“Why on earth would I do that?” she asked. In my dream she smelled of gin and old celluloid, although I do not remember the last dream I had where anyone smelled of anything. She smiled, a perfect black-and-white smile. “I got out, didn’t I?” Then she stood up and walked around the room.

“I can’t believe this hotel is still standing,” she said. “I used to fuck here.” Her voice was filled with crackles and hisses. She came back to the bed and stared at me, as a cat stares at a hole.

“Do you worship me?” she asked.

I shook my head. She walked over to me and took my flesh hand in her silver one.

“Nobody remembers anything anymore,” she said. “It’s a thirty-minute town.”

Some days before, I’d asked Pious Dundas whether anyone was with Belushi in the chalet, on the night that he died.

If anyone would know, I figured, he would.

“He died alone,” said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. “It don’t matter a rat’s ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.”

I stopped by the pool for the last time, to say good-bye to Pious Dundas, and to Hollywood.

Three ghost white carp drifted, fins flicking minutely, through the eternal present of the pool.

I remembered their names: Buster, Ghost, and Princess; but there was no longer any way that anyone could have told them apart.

The car was waiting for me, by the hotel lobby. It was a thirty-minute drive to the airport, and already I was starting to forget.

This scares me just a little. As we write we summon little demons.

The handcuffs are removed. He's left alone.

The hangings are red velvet, then they lift,

reveal the Queen. We recognize her face,

the woman we saw on the VCR.

'The world divides so sweetly, neatly up

into the feeder-folk, into their prey.'

That's what she says. Her voice is soft and sweet.

Imagine honey-ants: the tiny head,

the chest, the tiny arms, the tiny hands,

and after that the bloat of honey-swell,

the abdomen enormous as it hangs

translucent, made of honey, sweet as lust.

The QUEEN has quite a perfect little face,

her breasts are pale, blue-veined; her nipples pink;

her hands are white. But then, below her breasts

the whole swells like a whale or like a shrine,

a human honey-ant, she's huge as rooms,

as elephants, as dinosaurs, as love.

Her flesh is opalescent, and she calls

poor WEBSTER to her. And he nods and comes.

I see her then,

the pale fair girl, the smile has reached her lips,

her skirts so long as she slips, gray-eyed,

amused beyond all bearing, from the room.

She’d many a mile to go that night.

And as she leaves,

from my vantage place upon the floor,

I see the brush, the tail between her legs;

I would have called,

but I could speak no more. Tonight she’ll be running

four-footed, sure-footed, down the white road.

What if the hunters come?

What if they come?

Be bold, I whisper once, before I die. But not too bold . . .

And then my tale is done.

When I was a boy, from time to time,

I stayed with my grandparents

(old people: I knew they were old—

chocolates in their house

remained uneaten until I came to stay,

this, then, was aging).

“ ‘In his house at Sunken R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming,’ ” interjected Seth. “Or, as the poet has it, ‘That is not dead what can eternal lie—’ ”

“ ‘But in Strange Aeons—’ ” chanted Wilf.

“—and by Strange he means bloody peculiar—”

“Exactly. We are not talking your normal Aeons here at all.”

“ ‘But in Strange Aeons even Death can die.’ ”

They told him that there was no village anywhere locally named Innsmouth. No village with a pub called The Book of Dead Names. He told them about two men, named Wilf and Seth, and a friend of theirs, called Strange Ian, who was fast asleep somewhere, if he wasn’t dead, under the sea. They told him that they didn’t think much of American hippies who wandered about the countryside taking drugs, and that he’d probably feel better after a nice cup of tea and a tuna and cucumber sandwich

He found the knowledge that he was over 600 miles away from the ocean very comforting; although, later in life, he moved to Nebraska to increase the distance from the sea: there were things he had seen, or thought he had seen, beneath the old pier that night that he would never be able to get out of his head. There were things that lurked beneath gray raincoats that man was not meant to know. Squamous. He did not need to look it up. He knew. They were squamous.

And now I’m thirty-nine, and one day I’ll be fifty, and she’ll still be nineteen. But someone else will be taking the photographs.

Rachel, my dancer, married an architect.

The blonde punkette from Canada runs a multinational fashion chain. I do some photographic work for her from time to time. Her hair’s cut short, and there’s a smudge of gray in it, and she’s a lesbian these days. She told me she’s still got the mink sheets, but she made up the bit about the gold vibrator.

My ex-wife married a nice bloke who owns two video rental shops, and they moved to Slough. They have twin boys.

I don’t know what happened to the maid.

And Charlotte?

In Greece the philosophers are debating, Socrates is drinking hemlock, and she’s posing for a sculpture of Erato, muse of light poetry and lovers, and she’s nineteen.

In Crete she’s oiling her breasts, and she’s jumping bulls in the ring while King Minos applauds, and someone’s painting her likeness on a wine jar, and she’s nineteen.

In 2065 she’s stretched out on the revolving floor of a holographic photographer, who records her as an erotic dream in Living Sensolove, imprisons the sight and sound and the very smell of her in a tiny diamond matrix. She’s only nineteen.

And a caveman outlines Charlotte with a burnt stick on the wall of the temple cave, filling in the shape and the texture of her with earths and berry dyes. Nineteen.

Charlotte is there, in all places, all times, sliding through our fantasies, a girl forever.

I want her so much it makes me hurt sometimes. That’s when I take down the photographs of her and just look at them for a while, wondering why I didn’t try to touch her, why I wouldn’t really even speak to her when she was there, and never coming up with an answer that I could understand.

That’s why I’ve written this all down, I suppose.

This morning I noticed yet another gray hair at my temple. Charlotte is nineteen. Somewhere.

The fat man sitting in the armchair, his eyes still tightly closed, continued: “We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.”

His head was lolled back on the armchair, and the tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth.

“You read my mind?”

The man in the armchair took a slow deep breath that rattled in the back of his throat. He really was immensely fat, with stubby fingers like discolored sausages. He wore a thick old coat, once black, now an indeterminate gray. The snow on his boots had not entirely melted.

“Perhaps. The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.

“Ah well. It’s too late now: The Elder Gods have chosen their vessels. When the moon rises . . . ”

A thin trickle of drool came from one corner of his mouth, oozed down in a thread of silver to his collar. Something scuttled from his collar into the shadows of his coat.

“Yeah? What happens when the moon rises?”

The man in the armchair stirred, opened two little eyes, red and swollen, and blinked them in waking.

“I dreamed I had many mouths,” he said, his new voice oddly small and breathy for such a huge man. “I dreamed every mouth was opening and closing independently. Some mouths were talking, some whispering, some eating, some waiting in silence.”

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,” he was saying.

“There hath he lain for ages and will lie

Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by men and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise . . . ”

The bonfire burned brighter now; burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae and of slowly drifting weed; burned with the color of emeralds.

She sliced across my throat.

Blood began to gush and then to flow. And then it slowed and stopped . . .

—The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming toward me from the night

—I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt

—my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame my eyes were topaz I could taste the night

My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air.

I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touching the snow.

I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her.

There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist, surrounding me. High in my leap, I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soap bubble . . .

I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor at the entrance of some kind of citadel built of enormous rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.

A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.

She was standing in the doorway in front of me. She was now six, maybe seven feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.

There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.

I felt like I was being crushed. I couldn’t think anymore.

She moved toward me. The weed that surrounded her head shifted. She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds; and somewhere in all that I knew she was smiling.

I pushed with my hind legs. We met there, in the deep, and we struggled. It was so cold, so dark. I closed my jaws on her face and felt something rend and tear.

It was almost a kiss, down there in the abysmal deep...

The creature bit the girl’s face off, dropped what was left on the sand,

and I thought: meat and chemicals, how quickly they

become meat and chemicals, just one bite and they’re

meat and chemicals...

“You know the saddest thing,” she said. “The saddest thing is that we’re you.”

I said nothing.

“In your fantasies,” she said, “my people are just like you. Only better. We don’t die, or age, or suffer from pain or cold or thirst. We’re snappier dressers. We posses the wisdom of the ages. And if we crave blood, well, it is no more than the way you people crave food, or affection, or sunlight — and besides, it gets us out of the house. Crypt. Coffin. Whatever.”

“And the truth is?” I asked her.

“We’re you,” she said. “We’re you, with all your fuckups and all the things that make you human — all your fears and lonelinesses and confusions . . . none of that gets better.

“But we’re colder than you are. Deader. I miss daylight and food and knowing how it feels to touch someone and care. I remember life, and meeting people as people and not just as things to feed on or control, and I remember what it was to feel something, anything, happy or sad or anything . . .” And then she stopped.

“Are you crying?” I asked.

“We don’t cry,” she told me. Like I said, the woman was a liar.

The wind blew cold as Peter left the pub, setting the old sign swinging. It didn’t look much like a dirty donkey, thought Peter. More like a pale horse.

Peter was drifting off to sleep that night, mentally rehearsing his coronation speech, when a thought drifted into his head and hung around. It would not go away. Could he—could he possibly be passing up an even larger saving than he already had? Could he be missing out on a bargain?

Peter climbed out of bed and walked over to the phone. It was almost 3 A.M., but even so . . .

His Yellow Pages lay open where he had left it the previous Saturday, and he dialed the number.

The phone seemed to ring forever. There was a click and a bored voice said, “Burke Hare Ketch. Can I help you?”

“I hope I’m not phoning too late . . . ” he began.

“Of course not, sir.”

“I was wondering if I could speak to Mr. Kemble.”

“Can you hold? I’ll see if he’s available.”

Peter waited for a couple of minutes, listening to the ghostly crackles and whispers that always echo down empty phone lines.

“Are you there, caller?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Putting you through.” There was a buzz, then “Kemble speaking.”

“Ah, Mr. Kemble. Hello. Sorry if I got you out of bed or anything. This is, um, Peter Pinter.”

“Yes, Mr. Pinter?”

“Well, I’m sorry it’s so late, only I was wondering . . . How much would it cost to kill everybody? Everybody in the world?”

“Everybody? All the people?”

“Yes. How much? I mean, for an order like that, you’d have to have some kind of a big discount. How much would it be? For everyone?”

“Nothing at all, Mr. Pinter.”

“You mean you wouldn’t do it?”

“I mean we’d do it for nothing, Mr. Pinter. We only have to be asked, you see. We always have to be asked.”

Peter was puzzled. “But—when would you start?”

“Start? Right away. Now. We’ve been ready for a long time. But we had to be asked, Mr. Pinter. Good night. It has been a pleasure doing business with you.”

The line went dead.

Peter felt strange. Everything seemed very distant. He wanted to sit down. What on earth had the man meant? “We always have to be asked.” It was definitely strange. Nobody does anything for nothing in this world; he had a good mind to phone Kemble back and call the whole thing off. Perhaps he had overreacted, perhaps there was a perfectly innocent reason why Archie and Gwendolyn had entered the stockroom together. He would talk to her; that’s what he’d do. He’d talk to Gwennie first thing tomorrow morning . . .

That was when the noises started.

Odd cries from across the street. A catfight? Foxes probably. He hoped someone would throw a shoe at them. Then, from the corridor outside his flat, he heard a muffled clumping, as if someone were dragging something very heavy along the floor. It stopped. Someone knocked on his door, twice, very softly.

Outside his window the cries were getting louder. Peter sat in his chair, knowing that somehow, somewhere, he had missed something. Something important. The knocking redoubled. He was thankful that he always locked and chained his door at night.

They’d been ready for a long time, but they had to be asked. . .

When the thing came through the door, Peter started screaming, but he really didn’t scream for very long.

After all the dreaming is over, after you wake, and leave the world of madness and glory for the mundane day-lit daily grind, through the wreckage of your abandoned fancies walks the sweeper of dreams.

Who knows what he was when he was alive? Or if, for that matter, he ever was alive. He certainly will not answer your questions. The sweeper talks little, in his gruff gray voice, and when he does speak it is mostly about the weather and the prospects, victories and defeats of certain sports teams. He despises everyone who is not him.

Just as you wake he comes to you, and he sweeps up kingdoms and castles, and angels and owls, mountains and oceans. He sweeps up the lust and the love and the lovers, the sages who are not butterflies, the flowers of meat, the running of the deer and the sinking of the Lusitania. He sweeps up everything you left behind in your dreams, the life you wore, the eyes through which you gazed, the examination paper you were never able to find. One by one he sweeps them away: the sharp-toothed woman who sank her teeth into your face; the nuns in the woods; the dead arm that broke through the tepid water of the bath; the scarlet worms that crawled in your chest when you opened your shirt.

He will sweep it up—everything you left behind when you woke. And then he will burn it, to leave the stage fresh for your dreams tomorrow.

Treat him well, if you see him. Be polite with him. Ask him no questions. Applaud his teams’ victories, commiserate with him over their losses, agree with him about the weather. Give him the respect he feels is his due.

For there are people he no longer visits, the sweeper of dreams, with his hand-rolled cigarettes and his dragon tattoo.

You’ve seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. Some of them walk the cities in ragged clothes, their belongings under their arms. Others of their number are locked in the dark, in places where they can no longer harm themselves or others. They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. It is worse than madness. They will tell you, if you let them: they are the ones who live, each day, in the wreckage of their dreams.

And if the sweeper of dreams leaves you, he will never come back.

For many centuries I’ve walked the world

dispensing something that resembled love—

a stolen kiss, then back into the night

contented by the life and by the blood.

And come the morning I was just a dream,

cold body chilling underneath a stone.

My father called a sea like this “a widow-maker.”

My mother said the sea was always a widow-maker,

even when it was gray and smooth as sky. And she was right.

My father drowned in fine weather.

Sometimes I wonder if his bones have ever washed ashore,

or if I’d know them if they had,

twisted and sea-smoothed as they would be.

“ ‘Poor Carasel? Indeed I did. I was leaving the Hall—there are a number of concepts we are currently constructing, and I wished to ponder one of them, Regret by name. I was planning to get a little distance from the City—to fly above it, I mean, not to go into the Dark outside, I wouldn’t do that, although there has been some loose talk amongst . . .but, yes. I was going to rise and contemplate.

“ ‘I left the Hall, and . . .’ he broke off. He was small, for an angel. His light was muted, but his eyes were vivid and bright. I mean really bright. ‘Poor Carasel. How could he do that to himself? How?’

“ ‘You think his destruction was self-inflicted?’

“He seemed puzzled—surprised that there could be any other explanation. ‘But of course. Carasel was working under me, developing a number of concepts that shall be intrinsic to the universe when its Name shall be Spoken. His group did a remarkable job on some of the real basics—Dimension was one, and Sleep another. There were others.

“ ‘Wonderful work. Some of his suggestions regarding the use of individual viewpoints to define dimensions were truly ingenious.

“ ‘Anyway. He had begun work on a new project. It’s one of the really major ones—the ones that I would usually handle, or possibly even Zephkiel.’ He glanced upward. ‘But Carasel had done such sterling work. And his last project was so remarkable. Something apparently quite trivial that he and Saraquael elevated into . . .’ he shrugged. ‘But that is unimportant. It was this project that forced him into nonbeing. But none of us could ever have foreseen . . .’

“ ‘What was his current project?’

“Phanuel stared at me. ‘I’m not sure I ought to tell you. All the new concepts are considered sensitive until we get them into the final form in which they will be Spoken.’

“I felt myself transforming. I am not sure how I can explain it to you, but suddenly I wasn’t me—I was something larger. I was transfigured: I was my function.

“Phanuel was unable to meet my gaze.

“ ‘I am Raguel, who is the Vengeance of the Lord,’ I told him. ‘I serve the Name directly. It is my mission to discover the nature of this deed, and to take the Name’s vengeance on those responsible. My questions are to be answered.’

“The little angel trembled, and he spoke fast.

“ ‘Carasel and his partner were researching Death. Cessation of life. An end to physical, animated existence. They were putting it all together. But Carasel always went too far into his work—we had a terrible time with him when he was designing Agitation. That was when he was working on Emotions . . .’

“ ‘You think Carasel died to—to research the phenomenon?’

“ ‘Or because it intrigued him. Or because he followed his research just too far.

In the center of the Silver City was a park—a place of recreation and rest. I found the Angel Lucifer there, beside a river. He was just standing, watching the water flow.

“ ‘Lucifer?’

“He inclined his head. ‘Raguel. Are you making progress?’

“ ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I need to ask you a few questions. Do you mind?’

“ ‘Not at all.’

“ ‘How did you come upon the body?’

“ ‘I didn’t. Not exactly. I saw Phanuel standing in the street. He looked distressed. I inquired whether there was something wrong, and he showed me the dead angel. And I fetched you.’

“ ‘I see.’

“He leaned down, let one hand enter the cold water of the river. The water splashed and rolled around it. ‘Is that all?’

“ ‘Not quite. What were you doing in that part of the city?’

“ ‘I don’t see what business that is of yours.’

“ ‘It is my business, Lucifer. What were you doing there?’

“ ‘I was . . . walking. I do that sometimes. Just walk and think. And try to understand.’ He shrugged.

“ ‘You walk on the edge of the City?’

“A beat, then ‘Yes.’

Saraquael was working there, putting a wingless mannikin into a small box. On one side of the box was a representation of a small brown creature with eight legs. On the other was a representation of a white blossom.

“ ‘Saraquael?’

“ ‘Hm? Oh, it’s you. Hello. Look at this. If you were to die and to be, let us say, put into the earth in a box, which would you want laid on top of you—a spider, here, or a lily, here?’

“ ‘The lily, I suppose.’

‘Yes, that’s what I think, too. But why? I wish . . .” He raised a hand to his chin, stared down at the two models, put first one on top of the box, then the other, experimentally. ‘There’s so much to do, Raguel. So much to get right. And we only get one chance at it, you know. There’ll just be one universe—we can’t keep trying until we get it right. I wish I understood why all this was so important to Him...

“I walked to the central well of the Hall and let myself fall, tumbling down through the model of the universe: it glittered around me, unfamiliar colors and shapes seething and writhing without meaning.

“As I approached the bottom, I beat my wings, slowing my descent, and stepped lightly onto the silver floor. Phanuel stood between two angels who were both trying to claim his attention.

“ ‘I don’t care how aesthetically pleasing it would be,’ he was explaining to one of them. ‘We simply cannot put it in the center. Background radiation would prevent any possible life-forms from even getting a foothold; and anyway, it’s too unstable.’

“He turned to the other. ‘Okay, let’s see it. Hmm. So that’s Green, is it? It’s not exactly how I’d imagined it, but. Mm. Leave it with me. I’ll get back to you.’ He took a paper from the angel, folded it over decisively.

High above the City a phalanx of angels wheeled and circled and dove. Each held a flaming sword that trailed a streak of burning brightness behind it, dazzling the eye. They moved in unison through the salmon pink sky. They were very beautiful. It was—you know on summer evenings when you get whole flocks of birds performing their dances in the sky? Weaving and circling and clustering and breaking apart again, so just as you think you understand the pattern, you realize you don’t, and you never will? It was like that, only better.

Saraquael? Who did Carasel love? Who was his lover?’

“He stared at the floor. Then he stared up, proudly, aggressively. And he smiled.

“ ‘I was.’

“ ‘Do you want to tell me about it?”

“ ‘No.’ A shrug. ‘But I suppose I must. Very well, then.

“ ‘We worked together. And when we began to work on Love . . . we became lovers. It was his idea. We would go back to his cell whenever we could snatch the time. There we touched each other, held each other, whispered endearments and protestations of eternal devotion. His welfare mattered more to me than my own. I existed for him. When I was alone, I would repeat his name to myself and think of nothing but him.’

“ ‘When I was with him . . .’ he paused. He looked down. ‘Nothing else mattered.’

“I walked to where Saraquael stood, lifted his chin with my hand, stared into his gray eyes. ‘Then why did you kill him?’

“ ‘Because he would no longer love me. When we started to work on Death, he . . . he lost interest. He was no longer mine. He belonged to Death. And if I could not have him, then his new lover was welcome to him. I could not bear his presence—I could not endure to have him near me and to know that he felt nothing for me. That was what hurt the most. I thought . . . I hoped . . . that if he was gone, then I would no longer care for him—that the pain would stop.

“ ‘So I killed him. I stabbed him, and I threw his body from our window in the Hall of Being. But the pain has not stopped.’ It was almost a wail.

“Saraquael reached up, removed my hand from his chin. ‘Now what?’

“I felt my aspect begin to come upon me; felt my function possess me. I was no longer an individual—I was the Vengeance of the Lord.

“I moved close to Saraquael and embraced him. I pressed my lips to his, forced my tongue into his mouth. We kissed. He closed his eyes.

“I felt it well up within me then: a burning, a brightness. From the corner of my eyes, I could see Lucifer and Phanuel averting their faces from my light; I could feel Zephkiel’s stare. And my light became brighter and brighter until it erupted—from my eyes, from my chest, from my fingers, from my lips: a white searing fire.

“The white flames consumed Saraquael slowly, and he clung to me as he burned.

“Soon there was nothing left of him. Nothing at all.

“I felt the flame leave me. I returned to myself once more.

“Phanuel was sobbing. Lucifer was pale. Zephkiel sat in his chair, quietly watching me.

“I turned to Phanuel and Lucifer. ‘You have seen the Vengeance of the Lord,’ I told them. ‘Let it act as a warning to you both.’

“Lucifer walked over to the place on the silver floor where Saraquael had once stood. He knelt, stared desperately at the floor as if he were trying to find some remnant of the angel I had destroyed, a fragment of ash, or bone, or charred feather, but there was nothing to find. Then he looked up at me.

“ ‘That was not right,’ he said. ‘That was not just.’ He was crying; wet tears ran down his face. Perhaps Saraquael was the first to love, but Lucifer was the first to shed tears. I will never forget that.

“I stared at him impassively. ‘It was justice. He killed another. He was killed in his turn. You called me to my function, and I performed it.

“ ‘But . . . he loved. He should have been forgiven. He should have been helped. He should not have been destroyed like that. That was wrong.’

“ ‘It was His will.’

“Lucifer stood. ‘Then perhaps His will is unjust. Perhaps the voices in the Darkness speak truly, after all. How can this be right?’

“ ‘It is right. It is His will. I merely performed my function.’

“He wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. ‘No,’ he said, flatly. He shook his head, slowly, from side to side. Then he said, ‘I must think on this. I will go now.’

“He walked to the window, stepped into the sky, and he was gone.

“Zephkiel and I were alone in his cell. I went over to his chair.

He nodded at me. ‘You have performed your function well, Raguel. Shouldn’t you return to your cell to wait until you are next needed?’ ” The man on the bench turned toward me: his eyes sought mine. Until now it had seemed—for most of his narrative—that he was scarcely aware of me; he had stared ahead of himself, whispered his tale in little better than a monotone. Now it felt as if he had discovered me and that he spoke to me alone, rather than to the air, or the City of Los Angeles. And he said:

“I knew that he was right. But I couldn’t have left then—not even if I had wanted to. My aspect had not entirely left me; my function was not completely fulfilled. And then it fell into place; I saw the whole picture. And like Lucifer, I knelt. I touched my forehead to the silver floor. ‘No, Lord,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

“Zephkiel rose from his chair. ‘Get up. It is not fitting for one angel to act in this way to another. It is not right. Get up!”

“I shook my head. ‘Father, You are no angel,’ I whispered.

“Zephkiel said nothing. For a moment, my heart misgave within me. I was afraid. ‘Father, I was charged to discover who was responsible for Carasel’s death. And I do know.’

“ ‘You have taken your Vengeance, Raguel.’

“ ‘Your Vengeance, Lord.’

“And then He sighed and sat down once more. ‘Ah, little Raguel. The problem with creating things is that they perform so much better than one had ever planned. Shall I ask how you recognized me?’

“ ‘I . . . I am not certain, Lord. You have no wings. You wait at the center of the City, supervising the Creation directly. When I destroyed Saraquael, You did not look away. You know too many things. You . . .’ I paused and thought. ‘No, I do not know how I know. As You say, You have created me well. But I only understood who You were, and the meaning of the drama we had enacted here for You, when I saw Lucifer leave.’

“ ‘What did you understand, child?’

“ ‘Who killed Carasel. Or, at least, who was pulling the strings. For example, who arranged for Carasel and Saraquael to work together on Love, knowing Carasel’s tendency to involve himself too deeply in his work?’

“He was speaking to me gently, almost teasingly, as an adult would pretend to make conversation with a tiny child. ‘Why should anyone have “pulled the strings,” Raguel?’

“ ‘Because nothing occurs without reason; and all the reasons are Yours. You set Saraquael up: yes, he killed Carasel. But he killed Carasel so that I could destroy him.’

“ ‘And were you wrong to destroy him?’

“I looked into His old, old eyes. ‘It was my function. But I do not think it was just. I think perhaps it was needed that I destroy Saraquael, in order to demonstrate to Lucifer the Injustice of the Lord.’

“He smiled, then. ‘And whatever reason would I have for doing that?’

“ ‘I . . . I do not know. I do not understand—no more than I understand why You created the Dark or the voices in the Darkness. But You did. You caused all this to occur.’

“He nodded. ‘Yes. I did. Lucifer must brood on the unfairness of Saraquael’s destruction. And that—amongst other things—will precipitate him into certain actions. Poor sweet Lucifer. His way will be the hardest of all my children; for there is a part he must play in the drama that is to come, and it is a grand role.’

“I remained kneeling in front of the Creator of All Things.

“What will you do now, Raguel?’ He asked me.

“ ‘I must return to my cell. My function is now fulfilled. I have taken Vengeance, and I have revealed the perpetrator. That is enough. But—Lord?’

“ ‘Yes, child.’

“ ‘I feel dirty. I feel tarnished. I feel befouled. Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.’

One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she came to my rooms. She was six. I was embroidering by lamplight, squinting my eyes against the lamp’s smoke and fitful illumination. When I looked up, she was there.

“Princess?”

She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.

“What are you doing away from your room?”

“I’m hungry,” she said, like any child.

It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.

“Here.”

Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the goose fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn’s apples; then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the crackling.

She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp yellow teeth.

“Is it good?”

She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and smiled—she smiled but rarely—then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood.

I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise, but she looked at me and I fell silent.

The little princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and sucked and drank. When she was finished, she left my chamber. Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab, and to heal. The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my hand with a pocketknife in my childhood.

I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more than the blood she had fed on. After that night I locked my chamber door at dusk, barring it with an oaken pole, and I had the smith forge iron bars, which he placed across my windows.

My husband, my love, my king, sent for me less and less, and when I came to him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make love as a man makes love, and he would not permit me to pleasure him with my mouth: the one time I tried, he started violently, and began to weep. I pulled my mouth away and held him tightly until the sobbing had stopped, and he slept, like a child.

I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept. It was covered in a multitude of ancient scars. But I could recall no scars from the days of our courtship, save one, on his side, where a boar had gored him when he was a youth.

Soon he was a shadow of the man I had met and loved by the bridge. His bones showed, blue and white, beneath his skin. I was with him at the last: his hands were cold as stone, his eyes milky blue, his hair and beard faded and lustreless and limp. He died unshriven, his skin nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old scars.

He weighed near to nothing. The ground was frozen hard, and we could dig no grave for him, so we made a cairn of rocks and stones above his body, as a memorial only, for there was little enough of him left to protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.

So I was queen.

If it were today, I would have her heart cut out, true. But then I would have her head and arms and legs cut off. I would have them disembowel her. And then I would watch in the town square as the hangman heated the fire to white-heat with bellows, watch unblinking as he consigned each part of her to the fire. I would have archers around the square, who would shoot any bird or animal that came close to the flames, any raven or dog or hawk or rat. And I would not close my eyes until the princess was ash, and a gentle wind could scatter her like snow.

I did not do this thing, and we pay for our mistakes.

They say I was fooled; that it was not her heart. That it was the heart of an animal—a stag, perhaps, or a boar. They say that, and they are wrong.

And some say (but it is her lie, not mine) that I was given the heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is what she has made of my life.

They brought me her heart. I know it was hers—no sow’s heart or doe’s would have continued to beat and pulse after it had been cut out, as that one did.

As a young lass I had worked at the fair, and they had scared me then, the forest folk. I told fortunes for the fairgoers, scrying in a pool of still water; and later, when I was older, in a disk of polished glass, its back all silvered—a gift from a merchant whose straying horse I had seen in a pool of ink.

The forest folk had money, though: a coin here, another there, sometimes stained green by time or the earth.

A foolish woman would have gone then into the forest and tried to capture the creature; but I had been foolish once and had no wish to be so a second time.

I spent time with old books. I spent time with the gypsy women (who passed through our country across the mountains to the south, rather than cross the forest to the north and the west).

I prepared myself and obtained those things I would need, and when the first snows began to fall, I was ready.

Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower of the palace, a place open to the sky. The winds chilled my body; goose pimples crept across my arms and thighs and breasts. I carried a silver basin, and a basket in which I had placed a silver knife, a silver pin, some tongs, a gray robe, and three green apples.

I put them on and stood there, unclothed, on the tower, humble before the night sky and the wind. Had any man seen me standing there, I would have had his eyes; but there was no one to spy. Clouds scudded across the sky, hiding and uncovering the waning moon.

I took the silver knife and slashed my left arm—once, twice, three times. The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet seeming black in the moonlight.

I added the powder from the vial that hung around my neck. It was a brown dust, made of dried herbs and the skin of a particular toad, and from certain other things. It thickened the blood, while preventing it from clotting.

I was bound and kept in a tiny stone cell beneath the palace, and I remained there through the autumn. Today they fetched me out of the cell; they stripped the rags from me, and washed the filth from me, and then they shaved my head and my loins, and they rubbed my skin with goose-grease.

The snow was falling as they carried me—two men at each hand, two men at each leg—utterly exposed, and spread-eagled and cold, through the midwinter crowds, and brought me to this kiln.

My stepdaughter stood there with her prince. She watched me, in my indignity, but she said nothing.

As they thrust me inside, jeering and chaffing as they did so, I saw one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without melting.

They closed the kiln door behind me. It is getting hotter in here, and outside they are singing and cheering and banging on the sides of the kiln.

She was not laughing, or jeering, or talking. She did not sneer at me or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw myself reflected in her eyes.

I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. They will have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with me.

The goose-grease begins to melt and glisten upon my skin. I shall make no sound at all. I shall think no more on this.

I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.

I think of her hair as black as coal, her lips, redder than blood, her skin, snow-white.