There is a kind of necessity you have to fall to find, the poet says. A kind of fate that runs beneath everything that happens. How can he describe it, and especially to a Dane? How can he make it clear?
'It is as though our lives were turning around something, a planet, a star, in a decaying orbit. As though we were about to break up like a space station crashing through the atmosphere. Who knows where our pieces would land? For now, all there was was falling, a kind of shipwreck in the air.
'Sometimes, for a time, others fall alongside you. You can reach out, touch them. You can look into their faces. But still, you are falling. How can you help the one who is falling beside you? And how might she help you?
'Ann's life, the story of her life, I pieced together from several conversations, at the cafe, first of all, and then, one night, in the cellar of the house in which I had a room. In the cellar: it came together there; the story took on its final form. I saw her falling as I was, and saw her falling away from me.
'Back then, in the cafe, I admired her independence, the way she seemed always in the middle of something, some great task, some project. She had her own agenda, her own world, which only partially intersected with those of us at the cafe. At first, when she arrived, in her vest and combat trousers, it was en route to somewhere else. The cafe offered a reprieve, a pit stop, and that was all. She had to be somewhere else! With other people! Not here, not here, in the afternoon shade.
'And then? She began to linger over the gossip magazines. She drank one cup of tea, and then another. Her life was elsewhere, her demeanour said, her car keys on the table beside her, but it was also here, in the cafe. What was keeping her there? I will not say it was me, says the poet. Far from it – the opposite, in fact. I read my books and sat at my table. I drank my tea. If she sat with me, it was because I let her talk. Because I didn't interrupt her.
'And how could I have thought of making such an interruption? What right did I have? As I listened, it was as though I'd come across a clearing in the forest. The sun shone warmly on my face. I had a role. I was a listener, a witness. Ann's words were to reverberate in me. To echo through me, at that time, and forever.
'I have always liked to listen, though you wouldn't guess that, would you, Dane? I like to listen to anyone but Danes. I like stories, true stories. I love to hear about lives, and the sadness of lives. I like the feeling of time passing'.
What did she tell him, Ann? That she'd been wound up too tight for most of her life. That she'd had to depend too much on her own resources. Her parents split up when she was fifteen. Her father was a violent man, an alcoholic. He'd been institutionalised, the police led him away. He was kept, drugged, in a padded cell.
But when he came out, he was still murderous. He tried to strangle her mother, who left him, taking the childen. But then the mother had a nervous breakdown. The children were split up, and Ann was sent to Brighton to live, with her aunt and uncle.
'She sensed they didn't want her there. She became difficult, rebellious. She failed her 'A' levels. She had to go out to work. She became a junior sales rep for Proctor & Gamble. She drove the motorways north and south.
'She fell in with a gangster, who showed her how to create fake identities and fake bank accounts, and to get loans and mortgages on that basis. So she invested in property. Then she got the loan to start her recording studio.
'She'd always been musical, she said. She'd played working man's clubs in her father's covers band as a teenager. He was musical, too. Once, Ann showed me a picture of herself in a ra-ra skirt and covered in make up. She had long hair and a long nose. She was playing a keyboard. She was fifteen then, she told me.
'And then? Her recording business was successful. She and her business partner recorded music for TV shows. They recorded messages to be read out over shopping mall tannoys. They helped would-be singer songwriters make demos. And bands, some of them quite well known, would use her facilities to record B-sides.
'And then? She had a nose job, she said. She regretted that. It was to get back at a boyfriend, who'd split up with her. He'd taken the piss out of her nose. So she had it fixed. Now it was snub and small and pretty. But since the operation, she had sinus problems. She couldn't breathe very well, especially when it was hot, and her bedroom, at the top of her house, was very hot.
'She thought she was going to suffocate. She had a terrible fever. She stayed in her room with an improvised bedpan. It was too much, the world was too much. She was thirty-one, she said, and she didn't know who she was.
'But why was she telling me all this?, Ann said. I was so calm. So still. I could be a counsellor, she said. I could be a priest, her priest. She was attracted to religion, she said, without knowing anything about it. She'd describe herself as a spiritual person, if that didn't make her sound like a hippy'.
Did Ann believe in God? She tried to, she said. God: what was God to her? A warm afternoon. Summer light, falling in benediction. An immense sense of peace. The turning sky. An arm of the milky way at night, seen from out in the countryside away from the streetlights. God: was that what her sister was looking for, with her addictions? God: peace and stillness.
She wanted things to make sense, Ann said. Lately, she'd been going to gay clubs, Ann said. That helped things make sense. She took out a lifetime membership in the Paradise Factory. Now no one on the door asked her if she was gay. She showed them her membership card, and that was it. £90, it cost her, but she didn't mind. She was part of something.
She'd had her hair cut short. She regretted her nose job – she wished she'd kept her long, rather masculine nose. She smoked rollies and her voice was deepening. She was writing an album about her sexuality, she said. One of the songs was called, 'Guess My Sex'.
She told her mum she might be gay. Her mum was okay with that. She hadn't told her dad. She barely saw him, anyway. She'd told her counsellor. He wasn't supposed to say anything in response. It was Rogerian counselling, where the counsellor keeps quiet, and the patient can say whatever she likes. And she told her doctor. I think I'm gay, she said.
And when the gangster reappeared, as he did now and then, she told him, too. He'd guessed, the gangster said. So he already knew! It was a vindication, for Ann. She was impressed. She told him he probably wouldn't see her gain. He'd guessed that, too, said the gangster.
'Why aren't you a woman?, Ann asked me. She spoke to him as though he was. Couldn't you have the operation?, she said. Couldn't you become a woman? Then we'd be two women. Two women together. She still wasn't sure she'd ever had a female friend. Perhaps that was all she wanted, she said, a female friend.
'It was as a lesbian, now, that she drove to the cafe. It was as a lesbian that she had first one cup of tea, and then another. Her kohl-lined eyes looked round the room. She saw, and was seen. She dated an actress from Coronation Street for a week. She dated a female lawyer, a friend of mine.
'But Ann was a difficult woman, that was the rumour. She wasn't sure what she wanted. And besides, she might not even be gay, that was the gossip. She was a tourist. Bi-curious. Trouble. What did she want? What was she looking for? But now her eyelinered eyes were looking into mine. Her car keys sat on my table. I poured her another cup of tea'.
Ann was falling, he thought. So was he, the poet says, in his own way. But she was falling faster, and would fall beyond him, he knew that. There were only a few weeks left, and he'd never see her again, he was aware of that. But now, right now, she was turning to him as she fell. He was the one she spoke to about things.
'It's alright for you, she used to say. You have your books. You study. She hadn't read anything, she said. She was a child, she said. Life hadn't begun for her, she said.
'I told her about the medals they hand out for periods of sobriety at Alcoholics Anonymous. One, it might read, meaning a whole year on the wagon. Or five, or ten … My housemate, I told her, had just received a disc saying one. He was a one year old, the housemate liked to say. Well, I'm not even one, Ann said. Not even that'.
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