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Prose

The woman lives alone. She has long been sexless. When lustful dreams trouble her, reminding her she has a body, she reaches her legs to the other side of the bed, and lurches onto the cold emptiness. The bed seems wider than the world, her heart empty as the heavens, no boundaries in sight and no one to hear her plaint.

She was lying to several different people for money. She didn’t ‘not come’ from money; her mother had some money and since her mother was dead Romy had some money. She was twenty-nine. ‘I’m twenty-two,’ she said. Not everybody had to be a revolutionary. If she were rich she would be good at it.

Define yet again this propensity to write journals – an ongoing conversation with oneself, the inner necessity to define to a certain extent one’s relationship with the events of one’s life…

To lean back and forth on the common room rocking horse, thinking that I was part of something, a motion if nothing else, that might eclipse my pure presence for a moment. Pure, as in not part of anything; hardly counted, hardly desired, and if desired then not fitting.

A museum of objects in my study that accompanied the long journey of writing still cast their wonderment through thoughts and imaginary possibilities; the many pictures on the walls and desk – a small print of a Rainbow Serpent, birds, art, photos of dust storms, haze, smoke, a young boxer, mythical landscapes in Asia – all had this responsibility.

She herself was on her way to the moon, and if you laughed at the sight of the fish between her legs, she would eat you – and you came out again as a fish. The man had laughed, and half of him had already disappeared, he was staring straight ahead with a pair of black eyes, and he would go on doing that until she chewed his eyes to bits, and when he next saw something, it would be as a fish.

I could be a murderer, a thief, a seducer of minors, this country offered me the lot and in my anonymity, which hung like a protective cloud around my actions I felt my own response. I was beguiled, enticed, with all these impulses seeming already to have been lying, primed and ready, inside me. Vietnam was the sort of land in which I could get lost inside myself, the land of inner opportunity, and I did get ever so slightly lost and I committed one small crime.

The midwife looks at Regina’s hands on the reins and says, not good, the moon brings the fluids. And not an hour later the storm comes across and the creek bursts, sluicing the road. We need to go back and wait, says the midwife, wait until the waters go back into that damn creek, and the horse’s hooves can sink deep into the mud, every step along the road to yours.

Josie had always felt that pictured baby had nothing to do with her. So it was stranger still when she recognised her self more clearly in her aunt’s oil paintings. How could a painting be truer than a photo? Kate had captured some invisible element of air, like the petrol shimmer round her father’s shadow when he refilled the car.

Julius, was the name of my first love at summer camp different rules applied, he & I were allowed to hold hands people smiled indulgently, called us ‘the couple’ ‘the camp couple’ on my part, guilty as charged

If you can’t see them any more, then I think I must really be dead. Record in the case notes which of my conjectures you can confirm or dismiss. Draw what you can; measure what you can. But first and foremost: sharpen your scalpels, gentlemen, so that you don’t make a mess of it.

Last year I found myself at Lingnan University in Hong Kong to speak at a conference on action cinema. What better place to reflect on the work of cinematic editing in all its forms, from the blazing guns and flying fists of blockbuster movies to the stridently flickering visual assaults of the avant-garde?

I put up my umbrella. Nothing else happens. I hold it above my head. I do this because it is raining. It is raining.

Fish can all turn and flit in absolute synchrony, iron filings will point to the pole, well we’re all arranged like that in a focus on the door, something has signalled to the herd that this is what we will do and we do it, we do not move even though the rain begins again and satins darken, shirts cling and faces mercifully run rivulets.

The electronic arts, video and television, have long been regarded as film’s poor relation, and despite the advances in technology which have rendered most of the negative comparisons invalid (the lack of clarity of sound and image and so on), this condescending attitude persists.

The farewells are what I remember. How thin and white R. looked beneath his shock of hair when I said goodbye to him for the last time and he nodded to me without lifting his head from the pillow, just briefly closing his eyes. How I didn’t go back to his bed, but simply closed the door behind me. The next day I had to pick up his things from the hospital, including the razor I’d charged for him the day before. The razor was charged, but R. was dead.

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