HEAT Series 2

The music-loving bohemian was tall, solidly built with dark hair, strong features and a thick moustache which nearly obscured a bemused half smile. He was an imposing figure, more like a confident big brother or an indulgent uncle than a stern father figure.

When I saw them last year I had the impression that they had been carefully lifted out of the political into the world of the musée imaginaire.

‘I’m going to clone Rick,’ she once said to Megan. ‘Just give me a strand of his hair and I’ll make a duplicate.’ But that kind of talk made Megan nervous. Not that Jamie had any intention of cracking on to someone’s husband. But now, sitting on the edge of the bath, Jamie was careful to keep space between Rick and herself, to keep the conversation light.

She turned towards Didier but tried to avoid looking at him. He bent his hair into her face as he kissed her neck. Then he pulled off her jumper. Her arms collapsed though the sleeves. She had retreated to the furthermost point of her mind and it was from there that she heard him as he busied himself with her zipper: a vagueness, a proximity only. She felt the sly removal of her underwear with some surprise. But how the surprise? What was she thinking?

I was down in Hell discussing redemption. / All my dreams came true so fast. / Long primrose nights are coming back to haunt me, / nearly the only pleasure left.

If I have any advice to give to a beginner it is this: do not think too much. That makes for bad novels. By the same token, you must read, read extensively, read other authors, be curious about their work and respect it (behind the finest texts there is real suffering), the classics as much the moderns, from Marcus Aurelius to Michel Houellebecq, from Erasmus to Elfriede Jelinek, and write, write a great deal, scribble and scribble some more, and throw away much of it too, in order to give birth to the marvel of a hitherto unknown thought that surges out of its own self thanks to that unique act, for thought is neither external to nor anterior to the text, but consubstantial with the act of writing. Writers do not think, they allow themselves to be borne along.

The flat was dark and the light on the landing went off automatically after twenty seconds. At first, because of the darkness, I didn’t realise she was naked. You’re going to freeze, I said when the landing light came on again and showed her standing there, very straight, thinner than before. Her stomach and legs, which I had kissed so many times, looked terribly helpless, and instead of feeling drawn towards her, I was chilled by the sight of them, as if I were the one without clothes.

A ute erupts from gravel skid, / no match for the drunken / matador who slaps the bonnet // off his hip.

Even The Darkest Hour Lasts Only / Sixty Minutes says the billboard / at the Moss Vale Church

The poem at this point might have headed // nowhere, or in various directions, but settled / in a carpark cum beergarden

Fruit machines accept all cards for very punter / there’s an addict doorframed, they punctuate the street / as in a Florence gallery when restorers airbrush out / aureole and child to foreground areolae puckered / for remedial teething, too pure or too stoned / for lewdness

What I am about to tell you is the truth. I witnessed it with my own eyes; and I am a reliable person. I have often been complimented on my reliability. I have won awards. I would not have obtained my present job – as the senior public relations officer for a respectable company that makes chemicals and plastics – if I did not appear to be trustworthy and believable.

We wait in air-conditioning watching the pilot / of Lost in Space. There’s no Dr Smith / just wholesome cowboys wandering a moral maze, / dressing monkeys as aliens and killing Cyclops.

In interviews, when I mention that one of my favourite short-story writers is Hemingway, invariably there is an awkward pause, and often a bemused reaction. Surely I would name someone more fashionable: Alice Munro, maybe, or Lorrie Moore. My reply is always that Hemingway’s best work is important because he crafted a style and tone that approximated his ongoing themes and subject matter. For that alone he is worth reading.

My own feeling is that the current climate of mass communication is so Orwellian, you have to find some other way of broadening the bandwidth. Debate mode will never do anything other than short-circuit any attempts to achieve a sane perspective. Maybe we have to go into the imaginative space of fiction, whether in literature or film, to do the work of exploration more freely.

For some, and I’d venture that with poets it is more than ‘one-fourth’, lithium does involve losing these times of heightened artistic facility and productivity. Of course many poets have no affective illness, and many who do find lithium works for them, but if Shelley had lived under a medical absolutism that insisted all manic-depressives should be on lithium, he may never have said that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.