Category: Fiction

The flat. The living room, the phone cord unplugged. Do you know what would happen if I plugged it in?, the poet says. I'll get phonecalls, dozens of them! I'll get phone assaults from my friend the drunk.

He thought of him the other day, when he was walking past the tennis courts. A leather-jacketted drunk with a six pack in a plastic bag was wandering up and down the courts, asking for a light. Outside the courts, on the other side of a chain-link fence, children on BMXs laugh at the drunk. That's your dad, that is!, says one to the other. The children shout at the drunk, and the drunk shouts at the Indians playing tennis. Great shot!, he says. Love-thirty, he says. Say hello to your dad, says one of the kids.

It's began to rain. The Indians stop playing, and the drunk follows them out of the tennis court, and I see him close up. He's young, though his face is ruddy and hard. He looks happy, more than happy. Beatific, muttering to himself and smiling. Alright, mate, he says to me. Have you got a light? No light, I tell him, and he walks away, then turns and gives me the kind of wave you might get from passing royalty. He's king of the afternoon, I thought to myself, and we – the Indians, the kids on their bikes – are his subjects.

That's when I remembered my friend the drunk, the poet says. He's king of the night, king of the late night, holed up in his flat in another part of the city, already drunk. Drunk and getting ready to go out to make trouble. To stagger out of his door, full of aggression, and steer himself up to the drug dealers of Hulme and Moss Side. He's a romantic, my friend the drunk, the poet says. He sees himself as a beat poet, as a kind of seer.

A few years ago, I moved into a dry house – there was no alcohol there, no drugs. We all had our troubles, the poet says. I had mine, though it's none of your business. I took the room of the guy who became my friend the drunk, which was still full of his things: the plays he'd tried to write. A kind of journal he kept. His books on new age religions – on shamans and astral projection and the like. His Kerouac and Ginsberg. His Vonnegut and Heller. He'd been evicted, because he'd started drinking again, my friend the drunk.

It was a dry house, a calm house. We were there to put our lives together again in peace. There to slump in the great sofas, and sit out in the back in the old stable, smoking our cigarettes by the beheaded statue of an old saint.

That's where I'd sit with my friend the drunk a year later, when he moved back in, hoping, ever hopeful, to keep off the booze. I gave him his old room back and moved to another, vacated because another tenant – another Scot, like my friend the drunk, a worker on the oil rigs – had started drinking again and was threatening to rape me.

My friend the drunk arrived with his mess of possessions. He had joined the Hare Krishnas recently, and been expelled. He still had his saffron robe. He had been expelled from the Buddhists, too, but had kept a collection of Buddhist tracts and some Japanese art prints. Two big bin bags of dirty clothes. Beanies. Hippy gear. A box of LPs. A broken turntable. He'd pawned his hi-fi, he said.

He wanted to get back to his writing, he said, my friend the drunk. He wanted some time to think, some peace. He hadn't had much peace, of late. What had happened? I knew from others he'd been arrested several times. The police had come to our door more than once, my friend the drunk having giving them our address as his permanent residence. He'd been bothering people in a bar. He'd been driving under the influence. The police would take him into their cells for the night, and release him blinking into the morning.

He used to phone us now and again, my friend the drunk, filling the answering machine with his sing-song. We ignored him. He drawled. He accused us of things. He thanked us. He asked whether we were his friends. He said we were his friends, and that he knew he could count on us. He drawled. His voice filled the house. Sometimes he would appear, at the back door rather than the front, banging on the window, and my landlord would give him a couple of twenty pound notes from the rent I'd just paid him, and my friend the drunk would stumble out again into the sun.

*

Once, a long time ago, my friend had been an environmentalist. He'd dropped out of university and went to defend the hatching places of turtles on a Greek beach. There was a documentary made about him in the Netherlands. Later, when he'd moved back in, we watched it together, my friend as a young man with a beard, a bearded Adonis, speaking with great earnestness about the threat of tourism to the Greek ecosystem.

It was Germans, he told me. The great fat Germans with their beachtowels. The newly hatched turtles couldn't move for Germans and for beachtowels. How could they find their way to the sea? And sometimes the Germans sat on the turtle eggs that lay buried in the sand. What a fate for the young sea turtle, my friend said, to be squashed by a great fat fucking German!

So he moved back in, with his pile of stuff. My landlord gave me two twenty pound notes: take him out, he said to me. So we went out to the Chinese restaurant and ate for the first time in twenty years. He ate all the meat on the menu! And my friend told me how he'd decided to become a yuppie, to shave off his beard and buy a suit. And that's what he did: he bought a suit and shaved; he was handsome, he didn't look like a drunk; his olive skin was clear and unlined. Older than me, he looked younger, bright and strong and handsome.

Months passed. He ran a computing business from one of the rooms in the cellar, and we played network Quake there on the weekend, chasing each other's avatars through gloomy corridors. We downloaded Stan Ridgeway and Wall of Voodoo songs and sang along. We downloaded Ghost Riders in the Sky and Islands in the Stream, and sang along to them, too. We watched the X-Files and the WWF. We formed a society called Friends of the Kitchen. We sat out by the headless saint and chatted about life.

Months passed. My friend took the upstairs flat, and moved his office up there. But now he was away from us, away from the household who would always eat together every evening. He began to drink, smuggling bottles of wine into the house. He no longer appeared at meals. Soon, he hardly came down at all during daytime.

You could hear him moving about upstairs. You could ring him, on the internal phone. He didn't want to speak, he said. He was busy. He would only come downstairs at night, when everyone was asleep. At 3 AM or 4 AM, he'd sit out in the outhouse to have a smoke. So he was evicted, and took his possessions downstairs in boxes, loading them up into a van.

The police visits began again. He had been caught drink driving. They stopped the car and he came after them with a golf club. He was going out to murder someone, he me later. It was lucky he'd been arrested. He was full of murderous rage.

He was sent down for a year. He staggered; they held him. They led him down from the courts. They drove him off first to Strangeways, and then to a low security prison. He asked us to send him a package every month. He wanted stacks of FHMs, he said. They were a prison currency, he said.

Later, he told me he passed his time smoking dope in his cell. They all did. He was tough. He could look after himself. No one bothered him. The days passed, almost exactly alike. And then, six months on, he was let out.

Fresh air! He exclaimed, when I ran into him on the street. There's nothing like it! He seemed happy. He had great plans. He'd revive his business, he said. Revamp it. He'd expand into new areas. He was going to throw himself into work.

For the third and final time, he was allowed to move back into the house, although not into the flat or the cellar. He was to stay in a single room, which was to be his bedroom and his office. And we preferred, we said, if he joined us for dinner. So in he moved again, bringing his things up the stairs. His books. His records, though he still had no hi-fi. His clothes.

He painted the walls of the room a disgusting purple, and pinned up pornographic pictures of Czech models. He set up what was left of his computers in his new room, though he left them turned off. He was sick of working, he says. He went on benefits like the rest of us, and he and I would go out walking along the river. 

*

In those days, which I remember as an eternal summer, the last of the good times, we used to be visited by a bedraggled cat, whose owners had bought a dog. Henry – that's what we called him - used to sun himself in our garden, rolling fully stretched in the dust. 

His long white fur was always matted and dirty. His nose, too, was flecked with dirt. There was dirt round his eyes and his ears were torn ragged from a hundred fights. You could feel his spine when you stroked his back. Great tufts of white fur sprouted irregularly from his tail. He was sticky, too – never quite clean, although sometimes my friend would comb out all the dirt from his coat. Then Henry would stand purring in his glory; he was handsome again, proud and young. He stood up and arched his combed-out tail, a ragged plume.

Henry was my friend's cat, really; or my friend was Henry's man. Cat and man recognised an exile in one another. Both were loners, really – they had their own problems – but for a time they enjoyed the luck of a house that welcomed them. Henry was old, and these were his last months.

I wasn't there when my friend discovered Henry's body stretched out on the kitchen floor, and I wasn't around when he started drinking again. By the time I'd returned – I was visiting my family in the South – he moved out for the last time. He'd got a flat in the suburbs and lay drunk on the sofa all day, drinking.

At night, he would head towards Hulme and Moss Side, looking for trouble. He smashed a troublemaker's face in with a bicycle U-lock, and won the respect of a high up dealers. They smoked crack together in Platt fields at dawn. How do I get out of this life?, the dealer asked him. But he wanted to get into it, said my friend.

He addicted himself to crack deliberately. He was bored, he said. He wanted an experience. Now they would hangout, my friend and his dealer, watching films together in his flat and taking puffs on the crackpipe.

They visited the crack houses of Levenshulme, smoking with the others. He was liked, my friend; he was generous. The Gentleman, they called him. He liked it. He had a street name. It was pretty fucking cool. He'd buy crack for the whole house, and they would watch University Challenge together and he'd get all the answers right.

Prostitutes would sit on his knee, and sometimes he'd go back off with them into the bedroom with a painting by Stubbs on the wall. He was the one who identified it as being by Stubbs. They liked horses, the crack whores, my friend thought. They reminded them of their lost innocence or something. 

*

I've long since moved away, but my friend the drunk still rings me. Write down my exploits, he said, I want it all written down. He intended to write himself, he said. Have I read Trainspotting?, he asked. We spoke about Burroughs; he loved Kerouac and for him Leonard Cohen was the greatest of all drunks. Then he turned to the music he had loved as a child when he lived with his divorced mother. They would listen to Kris Kristofferson and Glenn Campbell. Now when he phones he sometimes holds the phone to the speaker. Not a word except, listen!

The last time he rang, he was very meek. He had no friends left, he said. No one rings him. Instead, he has to ring them, and he knows they don't trust him. We speak of our great mutual friend. She doesn't trust me, he says. It was 11.00; I was tired. You don't want to speak to me anymore, he said. Alright, I'll just go. I said, it's good to speak to you, I'll give you a ring sometime. He said, yeah in six months or something. I put the receiver down and he is still speaking, half-resentful, half-aggressive. And I'll come and see you, he says.

He speaks of the woman in the burkha next door. She has beautiful eyes, he says, but it's not enough. He plays cricket with her sons and sometimes she invites him in. It's not enough, he says, but her eyes are beautiful. Write that down, he says, everyone should know about me. He always asks for that – for his life to be recorded and for me to record it. One day he will write it all down, he says, but in the meantime, I should record it and share it with others.

He speaks about himself, his business. It's always about to fail, but there is always hope. He speaks about golf, and then football in which he knows I have no interest. He speaks about music, and finally, just when I show signs of leaving, he asks me about myself. But he's not interested; he cuts in, he becomes aggressive. You think you know everything, he says, but I'm pretty clever. I may not be as clever as you, but I have a great general knowledge, he says. Then a name I don't recognise. Do you remember that name?, he says. And then, it was from that game of Trivial Pursuits we played, do you remember? The pole vaulter.

I was a legend, he says, and I'm still a legend. Are you going to remember, he says, are you going to write this down?, he says. I'll write it down eventually, he says, like Burroughs, do you remember that line, "Me and the Sailor were working the yard", he says. You should keep a record, he says. Do you remember when we went out to that restaurant when I first moved in, he says, when you made me eat meat? You should write it down, he says, it would make a good story. Someone should write it down, he says, it's worth remembering. You think you're so clever, he says, but you should try and live my life. Go on, write it down. That'll give you something to write, he says.

You wouldn't last a minute inside, he says. X. (the dealer) respects me, and do you know why?, he says, because I'm hard. It goes back to when I was inside, he says, I handled myself. I used to trade cigarettes and FHMs, he says. They respected me, he says, the lads. I used to trade cigarettes with them, he says, they were so stupid. Write it down, he says, you should write about real things, he says. I'll give you something to write about, he says. You wouldn't last a minute in the crackhouses, he says, but they respect me. I talk to crack whores about Stubbs, he says, what do you think of that? Write it down, he says. You should write about real life, he says. I'll tell you about real life, he says.

Did you think crack whores like Stubbs?, he says. She didn't know it was Stubbs, he says, I told her it was Stubbs. She showed me a painting and I said, it's Stubbs, he says, and they were really impressed. They had this painting and they thought it was an original, they thought it was a real Stubbs, "is it worth anything?" they said, he says. So I picked it up and looked it over very carefully and I said, I – think – it's a copy, he says. But they were very impressed, he says. I always buy enough crack to go round, he says. We all smoke it, he says. It's not like you think, he says, actually it's not that addictive, he says. Not like drink, he says.

You should write this down, he says. Real life, he says. Not middle class life like yours, he says. And I'll tell you what, they were so tight in that house, he says. They wouldn't buy proper Coke, only Panda cola. They used to buy Panda cola because it was cheap, he says, it was really funny. I told them to buy real Coke, he says. It's the real thing, I told them, he says. They didn't know how to take it, he says. They're not used to having the piss taken out of them, he says. You couldn't have got away with it, but they thought I was okay. They trusted me, he says. I'm quite hard, he says. You know me, I can handle myself, he says. One day I'll write it all down, he says. Have you read Trainspotting?, he says. Like that, he says. You wouldn't understand it, he says, it's in Scots. I love bagpipes, he says, they make me cry. They remind me of the old country, he says. You never cry, do you?, he says. You don't know anthing about life, he says, real life. It's going on under your nose, he says, and you know nothing about it.

Stubbs, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", he says. It doesn't give you enough, the burkha, he says, you can only see her eyes, he says. But she has pretty eyes, he says. But it doesn't give you enough, he says, you can't see what she's like, he says. I play cricket with her lads, he says, and she makes me dinner, he says. She likes me, he says, but then I'm a good looking bloke, he says. Always was. Not that you aren't good looking, he says, but I was the good looking one, he says. It's because I'm tall, he says. Women like tall men, he says. Can you hear that?, he says, it's Leonard Cohen, he says. The greatest drunk of them all, he says. Can you hear that?, he says. It's Kris Kristofferson, he says, Sunday Morning Coming Down.

No one trusts me anymore, he says. You don't trust me, do you?, he says. I have been drinking a bit, he says. Business isn't going too well, he says. Haven't worked for months, he says. Been playing golf, though. You have to play golf for business, he says. Anyway, he says, I'll let you get on. I know you don't want to hear from me, he says. You've never rung me. How many times have you rung me? Twice?, he says.

Stubbs, though, he says, I knew you'd like that story. Write it down. I'll write it down one day. I'm reading again, he says, I knew you'd approve, he says. Vonnegut, he says. Have you read him? he says. Hilarious, he says. And I know you don't like Kerouac, but Dharma Bums, it's great that, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", do you remember that?,  he says. Burroughs, he says. Anyway, I'll leave you to it, I'll let you get on, he says, I can see you want to go. What are you doing? Turn the television on, he says. It's Dylan, he says. He's great, Dylan, he says. Shall I tell you who the new Dylan is?, he says. Shall I tell you?, he says.

You don't know anything, he says. I've got the answers, he says, I've lived, he says. I've seen life, he says. Stubbs, though, funny that, isn't it?, he says. But I won't keep you, I know you've better things to do, he says. You never want to talk to me, he says. No one wants to talk with me, he says. I know I ring too often, he says. Three times a night? Yes, sometimes, but I just want it to be like the old days, he says. Do you remember?, he says. No one has a sense of humour anymore, he says. Witchita Linesman, he says, listen!

Or imagine it this way, the poet says. Imagine reading the biography of a writer – one of those huge biographies they publish nowadays, one of those tombs. The early chapters tell of the early years, telling of struggle and despair, the inability to find a voice, the inability to be published, you want to reassure the one of whom you read. It's going to be olay. Everything will come right.

Later chapters see the first works are published, one after another, with a kind of necessity. And you want to say, be patient; hold something back; your great works lie ahead of you. Your early books are juvenilia, they are perfectly worthless, measure by what is to come, poor indices.

And then the years of triumph. Then the great bridge of the central chapters of the biography, arching up. Having read the first few hundred pages of the book, the account of our author's parents, and his parents' parents, you feel you've earned the right to revel in the reception that greet the masterpieces that stream forth from his pen.

You suffered with him, struggle with him, read of the critical reception of the early works as they came out, and now the masterpieces come that have given him immortality. There would have been no biography without them. He would have been but a minor author, forgotten with all the others.

Read on. Even the years of decline mean nothing to you. Even the marriages and divorces, even the fallings out with old friends are insignificant, for the masterpieces surround him, for it is upon them that his fame will rest. Does he know his own greatness? Somewhere, it knows itself in him. His genius knows itself in everything he's done.

And then, still later, when he had nothing more to say – when he can no longer ascend the plateau of his mornings, the open space beneath the sky where possibilities spread out all around him? Ah, but he has lived his life in one sense. The biography is nearly finished. The story of his final years will take a handful of pages to tell.

So he no longer leaves his house except in slippers: so what? So the glass of water beside his breakfast in his mornings is really a glass of vodka: what does it matter? One part of him is satisfied; in a sense, his life has already been rounded off. What is he but the ghost of his own authorship?

In the mirror, he sees a crumpled verson of that middle aged man posed seriously on the dusk jackets of his five-hundred-page masterworks. Crumpled: but he is the same man; his books will tell you, the assurance of his genius.

He wanders from room to room in the house he earnt from his royalities. He sits in an armchair overlooking his garden. Leaves on the grass. It's autumn, he thinks. Tomorrow, a journalist is coming to photograph his workroom, what irony! For he no longer works, not really. He is a potterer, a ghost.

Seventeen books – isn't that enough? Hasn't he written enough? And now imagine the biography of this life after life, of a writer who's written enough, and who writing refuses. Imagine a biography of the aftermath, of the life in decline – of a writer in involuntary retirement, whom writing has shut out from its garden, and whose workroom is only a place where dust drifts in the afternoon air, and the house that his royalties bought is as much of a tomb as the biography of him whose pages you turn.

Outside, autumn leaves on the grass. Outside, the grass that needs cutting – its last cut before winter. The old writer should rake up his leaves and build a bonfire, or he should ring someone else to do it: he's in retirement, after all. He should pour himself a glass of something and watch someone else at work. But why should he bother?

Then his gaze wanders out over his beech hedge to the fence that separates his neighbour's garden from road. Then it wanders out over where the road must be – he sees the roofs of cars, sees the upper windows of large houses like his. Sees bare branches of great trees, chimney pots, and imagines his gaze leaping street after street, and pressing towards the centre of his city, towards the bars where he used to wander with his writing friends, when he had friends, towards the restaurants in which he would host whole evenings and then to the river where he had strolled with this lover and with that. Where he had spoken inspiredly into the open air, where he had wooed by his genius, where his great reputation ran along ahead of them, he and his companion. And where they had kissed, a whole galaxy of light lighting up the water, the bridges beyond. Life, life!

Outside. He fears it now, he says. Where would he go if he were to step outside? How would he get there? Stay in, instead. Keep inside. After all, they can reach him here, the journalists who phone him for his year end book recommendations, his agent who still secures deals for his back catalogue, his editor who issues volumes of his occasional writings.

Sometimes an academic will write: they organise conferences on his work; students write PhDs. Sometimes enthusiasts, letters passed on by the publisher, who lament the great days when literature was at the centre of culture, when everyone knew our author's name.

But it's still famous enough, his name. It's become an adjective that joins it to a sensibility like Kafkaesque or Ballardian. His name crowns him, but it rides above him. How glorious his reputation, and small and crumpled he has become! Oh, how gloriously it rides, but when a young author who's weasled out his address knocks at his door to meet him, our author knows he's disappointing.

So what should he do, our imaginary writer whose biography we are reading? Imagine him in his workroom, the poet says, where the light falls aslant on his notebook. Imagine the whiteness of the page, and his hand as it runs across its grainy surface. Imagine the tub of sharpened pencils he keeps by him as the light falls evenly across the page.

What will he write, he who has already written enough? What to write, for the one whom writing has deserted? Not a story, but the undoing of stories. Not a narrative, but its unravelling, its absenting, like rivers that run away into the sand. A thousand and one beginnings, but no real beginning – his is a writing that unravels itself.

Imagine him, our writer, the poet says, there in his first floor work room at the front of the house, looking out over the street at mothers with three-wheeled pushchairs, dried up leaves on the pavement, car after car parked along the street, front wheels turned in to stop them rolling down the hill.

Now, he can begin it, the writing that occurs after writing. Now it can begin, the story of one who has the gift of writing, but nothing in particular to write. The light on a windshield: write of that. The crack on a paving stone: write of that. The trees half stripped of leaves, branches and twigs upraised to the sky: write of that.

The double decker bus that stops a hundred yards away: write of that, write of its passengers, write of the people who waited at the bus stop. Write of the weather, the autumnal sharpness in the air. Write of the pale blue sky. Write of the sharp edged disc of the sun, of the cirrus clouds. Write of the light that falls evenly upon all.

He's been given time, our author realises. Given it, and now he must let the writing on his page develop like a photograph from the gentle pressure of light. He will make an impression of time. Of the neglect of time. Of time's malaise, as it seems to sag from itself over the course of a long afternoon. Of time as it lengthens the afternoon into all of time, as dust motes drift and moments drift, prolonging themselves obscurely.

He's not writing anything right now, he tells his agent on the phone. Oh, just his journal, nothing important, he tells his editor. He scribbles away at a kind of diary, he tells the journalist. There's nothing personal in it, no secrets. It's of no interest to anyone, he says. Even he's uninterested in it. Rivers run into the sand. Clouds melt away in the desert air. What does it matter, what he writes now? What does it count for, when it will lead to no particular publication?

Writing adrift; errant writing. Writing that wanders along the edge of everything. That bespeaks its own nothingness, its unimportance. Why does our author feel he's attained writing in some way?, the poet asks. Why is it only now that he thinks he has come across writing, like he might some wild animal in a woodland glade?

He remembers a deer he saw crossing a field. It didn't see him. It hadn't sniffed him out; the wind was blowing in another direction. But there it was, alive, unscared, and living according to its own law. There it was, in the open, there where it thought no one was looking.

And so, now, with writing. Writing, at last, has been allowed to ignore him. To write itself by way of him, with his hand, but by ignoring him. And isn't this what he wanted? Wasn't this what he wanted all along – to be a way of freedom, a kind of corridor for something else?

He sought an open form: spacious, diaphanous. Sought to lift the events of which he wrote, to lighten them so that no continuous narrative was possible. There must be blocks, breaks – white space. So that writing might breathe. So that the present might breathe, and then the past.

So he wrote every morning, as the morning separated itself from the night. What time was it? Any time, every time. What time was it? All hours crossed there; all of time was present there. Nothing began, but everything was gathered up for the beginning. Nothing began – and it was no dawn that he sought in writing, even as it began to dawn outside. Nothing began and nothing would begin; the page would be where the beginning failed, and the day was curled back upon itself, unable to dawn.

How can he explain it to me? Imagine it in your mind's eye, the poet says. Rising early, each morning, and preparing to write. Rising early, at the head of all streams, the day sprawling out like a landscape seen from a mountain, hazy and indistinct, but majestic and broad.

Imagine it: the trickle that will become a stream and then a river. A place of beginnings, of the ability to begin. A place where the writing gathers its strength. But then imagine this: imagine not being able to write, the poet says. The trickle has become a desert. White fog obscures the view.

It rises to meet you, the page, the white page, on which nothing can be written. It looks back at you, the page without writing, and that allows no writing. The whiteness is intolerable. The page's white-in-white burns intolerably.

Its indifference. Its withdrawal. A bank of snow upon which you can make no impression. A wall of fog in which the hand of your outstretched arm disappears.

You cannot mark the page. Ink will not touch it. It will not lie down beneath you. You will not bend over it like a creator god. And it is intolerable. Have you gone snow-blind? Sky-blind? You've gone page-blind, the poet says, imagine that.

To be anyone at all: what kind of fantasy is that? Why did he want to be no one in particular? It's the opposite of narcissism, the poet says. Narcissus, looking at his image in the water, sees nothing at all. If he falls in, it is not beause he is bewitched by his beauty, but by the dream of his absence.

Every morning, he wrote, the poet says; every morning he stopped writing. Or writing failed him, trailing off in a million ellipses. Once, he had thought that by writing, you saved something from death. Preserved it – this memory, that – so as to arrest the flow of time.

Wasn't that why he kept a journal as a teenager? He had a sense that childhood was falling away. Adulthood was here, and time was rushing forward. Write, then. Remember. Hold fast to what would fall away.

And now? He wrote to forget, to experience what he could of death. Ellipses trailing. For an hour, he had written; he was a writer. And now? He was the ghost of his morning's work, which had shut itself off from him. The doors clanged shut. He was an exile from what he had written, and from himself as a writer.

Would he ever write again? He'd forgotten how. Forgotten, and each morning, would have to remember anew, find his way to writing anew. Make his mark. Mark it, and then fall away from marking. And now the pages he had written were like the Marie Celeste which everyone had deserted. It was writing that gave him life, and now it was writing that took it from him.

*

For the Hindu, the soul, after death, needs to be fed and looked after. It's search for the doorway to heaven depends on its deeds in life. And in the meantime? It searches, it is dreadfully vulnerable. Pity too his writing, the beginning he made each morning by writing, the poet says, which barely set out on its journey before it dispersed again.

Strange gathering that is the beginning of dispersal. Strange work that unworks itself, leaving nothing but the attempt to come to itself anew. To begin, to make a beginning, and then to lose hold of the beginning, and fall back into nothingness.

Nothingness: that's what divides the paragraphs of Solar Journal, the poet says. Life is not lived elsewhere, only here. Life comes to itself only here, on the page. Writing marks the return of life, hope, to themselves, and then their imminent dispersal. That will have been your life, those paragraphs by which you marked your days like a prisoner. That was it, those lines and crossbars, where weeks pass, years pass, but nothing passes.

But then he knew, too, that it was by those same marks – those lines, those crossbars – in which the passage of time failed to mark itself, that there was also a passage of sorts. It was enough to date the paragraphs – to mark the passing from one day to another. Here I am, each mark says, each dated paragraph. There I was, he could murmur to himself as he scrolled down the document, there I was, that day and the day before that …

I thought I lacked any real discipline, the poet says. I thought I lacked some faculty of application, the patience to proceed day by day on a greater work; to labour at anything where gratification is not immediate. It was enough, I thought to be able to write anything at all – to make a kind of mark on the page, to sink another pole into the earth, attached by telegraph cable to the one planted the day before.

But those marks, over time, let a kind of continuity appear – the days behind me had been stitched together by what I'd written. The thread of writing was drawn through the skin of my life. I thought I had written nothing at all, that bare continuity was enough. I needed just to breathe, to practice. Just to press the instrument to my lips.

Continuity: strange miracle. It was from a thousand beginnings that a book might be made. I had set an example to myself, I who lacked discipline, even as I remembered by what was written only that writing had been possible.

So I had written a book. A book, though it was made of a thousand beginnings of a book. But a book nevertheless. I gave it a title: Solar Journal. I turned its pages alone in my flat. I thought: it has its own light. It glows. I thought: it has nothing to do with me. I wanted to push it away, to let it live according to its own law. A horse nudging a just-born foal: get up, stir yourself, live your own life.

It was to be given to others, published. I want to lose it by seeing it in print. And so it was, the poet says. My work of three years, of a thousand botched beginnings, appeared between cream-coloured covers. Solar Journal, said the title. My name, though I wish my name hadn't appeared on it. Solar Journal: the book you want to translate.

I suppose a voyage in writing is not a real one. Or it is as journey that must be recommenced each time you write. Every day was always the first day. 1+1, as was written on Domenico's walls in Nostalghia, always equalled 1.  

Abandonment: I think that's how writing arrives. I think it abandons itself to life, and gives itself as it is lost, and as it loses its writer. I wanted to be abandoned by what I wrote. Wanted it to look ahead of me, ranging out.

You have to fall to find writing, I think, the poet says. To fall from the world, certainly. From the satisfactions of life – its complacencies, to be sure, but also its goodnesses. But you have to fall from writing, too, that's the second phase. Writing must become nothing at all. A wrong turn, an accident – it must be as though you accidentally brushed the page with your pen; that you accidentally began to type.

Casually, happening of itself, there was writing. There it is, dropped from the sky.

I do not keep the last word, but writing keeps it for me. The last word? No: one which, rather, erodes all words from within – which attenuates, by stretching it beyond its limit and all limits, the possibility of preserving anything by writing.

*

'Was it here I disappeared?', he said. 'It was here you stopped disappearing. Here where your absence could no longer be hidden', said the day. – 'Was it here I lost my ability to write?' – 'Rather that that inability spoke of writing's inability; that your malaise became the malaise of writing, and it spoke, rather than you'.

By making a past, narrating it, you also unmake it, the poet says. The story might be onesided, partial; it might be retold in another way. Then, too, it might only be a surface effect of another narrative, of another way of telling. It might only be a decoy, distracting your attention while the real story goes untold.

How then, to tell while remembering the artifice of telling? How both to make and to foreground the unmade, erasing what you say as you say it, so that only its utmost edge remains, like the circles a sparkler makes as you turn it in loops, that fade quickly in the night? That fade, and let the night draw forward, that let what is told wear the cloak of what cannot be told.

*

In some theologies, there is a kind of darkness that shines. There, in its negative radiance, lies all we can know of God. His absence is bright, present, although his presence is the opposite of all the ordinary things we keep about us.

Or is God what is there as those same things become extraordinary, when a kind of shadow stretches out from what we think we can see? Perhaps the condition of light hides itself from our seeing, and we each of us bear another seer altogether, with eyes all pupil, eyes all night?

He wants to explain it to me, but how can he explain? How can he put it into words? There is something triumphally unimportant about writing, he says. It does not matter; it matters to no one, and not even to itself. It adds nothing to the world. It takes nothing. It's as if it were born only by accident, when someone wasn't watching. As if it were born by a kind of neglect, and lived on in neglect. As though it wandered like an amnesiac, without memory and without sense.

How to follow it, then? How to fall to its level? By not caring enough. By not wanting enough. By writing as one might casually brush away an insect.

It does not matter: that's the condition of writing. Neglect, absentmindedness: that's how it begins. Isn't the abandonment of ambition its condition? Or rather, of ambition abandoning you, like Isaac Luria's God, who created the world only as He fled it, and for whom the universe is only the space torn open by His escape.

To be abandoned, then – but not to yourself. To a kind of distracted solitude, like a child on the road, singing to itself. It doesn't matter. An abandoned notebook; a grafitti tag no one needs to understand.

Why write? To let writing abandon itself. Why? To let writing not matter. To write of nothing at all, nothing in particular, making no claim. To write as the most ordinary person would write, who drifts with others in a crowd.

Some people are damned, Ann said, it doesn't matter what they do. Her sister, the youngest of the three of them, was damned, she thought. She didn't have a chance, growing up in the thick of it. At least Ann and her brother could remember a time before the breakdowns, before the divorce.

Ten years ago, Ann says, her sister still at school, lived with her mother. She was half nocturnal even then. She'd rise in the late afternoon in time for Neighbours, and sit watching it in her pyjamas. She'd leave bowls of milk with forlorn rice crispies floating about, and get ready to go out.

You heard a clatter of feet up the stairs. Music from the upstairs bedroom. Stomping about. Her sister was getting dressed. Making herself pretty. Then the clatter of feet down the stairs. Where was she going? Who was she going out with? You couldn't ask her. She'd roll her eyes. 'My business'. Cars would pull up outside, loud music thumping. The front door would open – close; her sister had disappeared for the night.

You couldn't stop her. Her mum tried and failed. No one could tell her anything. Ann tried, on the phone. She was sick of everyone and their advice, her sister said. Just – fuck – off! Her voice rose into a scream. Her mum screamed back. More screams. The front door slammed. Footsteps on gravel, marching off. You're your father's daughter, her mother called after her. You're a bitch, the sister shouted back. 

Her mother in tears on the phone: I shouldn't have said that. Ann: it doesn't matter what you say. Her sister came back in late, very late; it was light by the time her key turned in the lock. Light, morning, and her mother asleep in the chair where she'd sat to wait up.

Sometimes her sister didn't come back at all. Her mother crying on the phone: she's gone, she's left me. Ann: she hasn't left you. She's with her friends. She'll be back. And she did come back, the sister. She'd turn up a whole day later – a couple of days, very breezy: Hi, mum! And then quickly upstairs, moving softly. Hi mum!, and her mum past anger, past despair, didn't have the heart to follow her up. 

Once – almost at the end – her sister sat in when her brother and Ann visited for Sunday lunch. All three of them, and the mother, at a table. It was a miracle. Her mother was happy. It was like when they were young, but without her rampaging ex-husband about. All three siblings at a table, laughing, joking. Only they never asked the sister anything. Never asked where she went, or who her friends were. That was off-limits. The sister was here: that was enough. There at the table, and they were children again, though without the ogre who roared and shouted.

But they weren't children, that was the problem, Ann says. They didn't have a child's resilience. They'd grown old, terribly old. They sat at the table, and it was a pretence. The laughter would fall away and they'd be only their own again, all three of them. They were terribly old, and something had grown with them into a tumour. 

How much time was left? How long before her sister left the house and never came back? There were signs, signs. You know them all, Ann said. You've seen the films …

Peace: that's smack gave her, her sister said. Peace, spreading warmly out from her stomach. She felt lifted, lightened. Her blood was warm. She looked upwards, sighed with bliss. What was lifting her up? She felt as light as air.

Look in the mirror, someone told her. Why? She hated looking. But this time, she obeyed. What did she see? An angel, a beautiful angel. She could open her eyes at last. There it was – there she was: beautiful. A beautiful angel, her pupils shrunk to tiny dots. Oh God.

The high, her sister said – and this was years later, when she was trying to kick heroin on the rehabilitation course she'd lucked onto instead of a jail sentence; years later, when her teeth were rattling themselves loose in her mouth, when her cheeks were sunken, her skin grey; years, and her hair hung limply and her eyes looked out limply – the high was like nothing else, she said. It was religious.

She understood what the word God meant, the sister said. The word God … and perhaps there really was a God. Perhaps that's what she had seen in her own image in the mirror. Her God. A young, female God, very beautiful. A God whose pupils were shrunk to nothing.

She glowed, her sister said. Her arms and legs felt heavy, and there was a pleasant tingling on the surface of her skin as though it was being touched by a shoal of fish. The Most High, that's what they call God, isn't it?, the sister said. The Most High: higher than all highs, but those highs pointing up to Him like aretes. She saw them in her mind's eye, she said, riding up ever higher, flashing the light along their keen edges, converging on a single point: God.

She was losing her teeth, her sister. That's what Ann saw in the visitor's room. They were rattling in their sockets, working their way out. She didn't like to smile, said the sister. She had a partial dental plate, but she didn't like to wear it, as it sat sorely on her gums. Look, do you see? But Ann could only see the ruin of a mouth.

Her sister used to have such good teeth, Ann said. Now she spat them out when she felt it work its way free, she says. Rattling around the sink: a white tooth and its roots, and blood running away with the water. Her studded tongue explored the hole that was left.

She'll have to get a full set of false teeth one day, the sister said. It never looks the same, though, does it? She'd get the dentist to pull out all her teeth, one by one. To be done with them. Maybe she should get gold teeth, like a rapper.

Look at me, her sister said. I'm no angel now, am I? She's laughed. No angel. No front teeth, and a cackle instead of a laugh. Fingers stained yellow. A smoker's racking cough. I'm no angel now.

She looked old, terribly old, Ann thought. She'd gone from being a child into an old woman.

God had turned away from her, her sister said. God had disappeared into the sky. It's a shame, because she liked God, the sister said. She liked being religious.

It's like smoking, the sister said. The high wears off. The first time was the best time. And after that? All religions are about drugs, the sister said. She'd read that somewhere. They're all based on drug cults. The Rastas have it right, with their marijuana.

What happened then?, the poet asked. Did she make it through rehab? Ann shook her head. I told you, some people are damned.

Her brother was sweet and generous and kind. Everyone should have a brother like him, Ann said. He looked like her. They were identical twins, in her imagination, though he was taller and broader than she was. He had the nose she once had, before her plastic surgery.

He was glad she was gay, he said when she told him. They joked about it. They thought of all the anti-gay slurs they could. They laughed together as they painted the hallway and listened to Seal. He had a band, her brother, Ann said. They'd been signed by a major. They had a stylist. Her brother wasn't allowed to go out except in clothes their stylist had bought them.

Her brother's band were being produced by Bob Clearmountain, she said. She didn't expect me to have heard of him, but Bob Clearmountain was really famous. He did Sowing the Seeds of Love. She wanted to go and see them play, her brother's band, but lately she'd been afraid to go out. She was afraid to go downstairs and out of her door. Do you ever get afraid like that?, she asked me. Do you ever get frightened?

Her brother was really sorted, Ann said. He had a great girlfriend. She could see them getting married, Ann said. Someone was going to come out of the mess alright. It wouldn't be her, Ann said. She'd already messed up. She was messing up her life. But her brother – he was going to lead the life she should have had. And her brother's children (she often dreamt of her brother and his girlfriend having children): they would have whatever they wanted.

Is there a way of replaying your own life, of retaking it? Her brother's daughter: she thought of her, her non-existent niece, far ahead of her, living far beyond her. A perfect child: calm, like her brother. Long-nosed, like her brother. A blessed child.

Sometimes Ann thought her violence would disappear before the perfect calm of a sleeping baby. But sometimes she saw herself become yet more violent, shaking it to death, dashing its head against the wall. She was a murderer, she thought at those times, not a child rearer. She was a strangler, her hands were talons, and one day, they would drip with blood.

She laughed. She and her brother had the same hands. Their father's hands. I said I couldn't see it. They looked like elves' hands to me. She turned her hands into fists and looked down at them. The same hands with which she installed her kitchen. The same hands that lifted all that garden furniture from the back of her car.

Sometimes she expected to see cuts on her knuckles, dried blood. She fought people in her dreams. She scraped her knuckles along rough walls. She dreamt her arms ended in rounded stumps like baguettes. She dreamt her veins had opened and her blood fell like red rain.

What is a child? Innocence. What was she? Corrupt. We're all corrupt, she said.

How had her brother come through it? How had he survived? Because of his immense calmness, she said. He was like that as a baby – calm. Everyone loved him as a toddler. No one liked her – she was difficult and demanding, but he was calm, a kind of calmness possessed him, and set him aside from the madness of the family.

How old was she when she burned down the house? You see, she was mad, too; quite mad. She found some matches, struck them. The blankets went up in flame, the bed. She went screaming to her mother. At the doorway, they saw the whole room on fire. Nearly choking on smoke, they carried her brother downstairs in his Moses basket and went out onto the street.

Windows broke. The flames roared. Her mother took the baby up and walked up and down with him, but he was quite calm. She looked on in awe. She was a destroyer. Then the fire engine arrived.

No one blamed her for the fire. It was odd. They went around her in their temporary house on various errands. She felt left behind. Hadn't she just accomplished something, done something, a real act in the world? But her act was invisible. It had been smothered straight away. So she sang to her brother in his basket and looked out of the window at an unfamiliar street.

Her sister was born two years later. They'd moved into a third house, the young family, the one in a rough area where needles scrunched underfoot. Her parents barely talked. Her father went out drinking every night, and came back late. He was up at dawn to get ready for work. He'd started his own business. His eyes were dark and puffy from sleeplessness. His face was red.

Her sister filled the house with squalls of crying. Her mother kept her father away from the baby. She kept her, for her safety, in another room. And so they grew up, the three of them, the brother nearly silent at the centre.

What was he thinking? What was on his mind? No one knew. Some took his silence for a lack of confidence. They smiled at him. They sat him on their lap and stroked his hair. Others saw him as a source of strength. Ann did. He was somewhere firm and calm. He closed his eyes and closed himself upon himself. The house turned around him, a calm planet. Light and darkness fell on his closed eyelids. 

When he woke in the morning, he called up to Ann on the top bunk. She called back. Another day had begun. And at night, going to sleep, he called up to her then, too. Night night. Night night, she said to him, too. But her sister, who shared a bedroom with her mother, was never calm. She cried terribly as a baby, and, when she was older, they would find her trembling from some imagined horror.

Her sister had different hands to she and her brother. Her mother's hands. They trembled when she was upset, just like her mother's.

And now they were grown up, the three of them. And now her mother had left her father. And now her father lived in his house on the hill, alone but for his cat, which slept beside his bed.

*

His cat. It was later that summer that Ann drove me out with her to her father's house. Her father's new wife had phoned her and asked her to come up. There was an emergency: the cat was dying.

We drove out through the suburbs. The house on the hill, as Ann had described it. The lawns. And in the mud along the border of the grass, a black-furred cat, writhing. It's had a stroke, the wife said. 'It' – the cat had no name.

The vet had already been out. Have him put down, the vet said. He's not going to get any better. But the wife wouldn't put him down. She wouldn't ring her husband, either. You should have him put to sleep, the vet says. It's cruel to let him live. You can't do anything for him.

But the cat had to live. It had to be there when the father got home. The cat has to sleep beside him. The smell was bad. Faeces along the fur. The body spasmed. The cat cried. Pure pain. Pain, arching in a body.

But the father would want the cat alive, whatever. Because he was afraid of the dark, the broad-backed, bullying father. He feared the dark as he feared madness. Why did he fear it so? No one knew. He spoke to no one, the father, not about those things, though perhaps he spoke to his cat. 

The house, the lawn: that's where the father returned, each evening. It's from where he left, each morning. His business thrived. He worked hard. He saw his new wife and his new children at the weekends, inviting them up from the house he bought them. People had to come to him. He didn't go anywhere. He met the world on his terms.

And there was the cat, who slept beside him. He was a man who held himself together through rituals, Ann said. His cat was woven deeply into his life. They lived together, man and cat, used to one another, perhaps the father hoped they would die together.

The cat writhing in the dust, spittle round his jaw? What should she do?, said the wife. The cleaner had called her, she said. The cat had been like that all day, writhing in the dust, no longer living, but not yet dead.

Ann called her brother. Do nothing, the brother said. Do nothing: leave the cat. So we left it, and came away, driving back through the suburbs.

We have to attain the past, the poet says. Kafka said that. It's not there, inert, waiting for us. We need to find our way back, discover it. What questions can we ask of the past? What can we listen for which echoes there?

Two boys lost their ball in deep grass on a French hillside. Following it, they discovered it had fallen into an entrance of a cave. Inside, by the light of their torches, they discovered great ochre-coloured beasts painted on the cavewalls. Lascaux: the belly of the world.

And the belly of the past? He wants, the poet says, to remember the darkness that remembering carries with it. Wants to know the contours of the darkness even as they are drawn back, like a cave beast that reveals itself to torchlight.

Forgetting does not simply draw back from memory; it bears it. To carry a torch into the darkness is not simply to observe the expanses of the beast. For its shining ochre gives the darkness from which it emerges more depth and more presence. The night itself becomes dense; darkness heavy and more strange. 

Ann and I went down the stone steps into the cellar of my shared house. There, amidst posters of 80s popstars no one had bothered to take down, she spoke of her father's violence, of how he'd chipped her mother's front teeth when he hit her in the face with a tea mug. She told me how he made his new family – his young wife and children – live in a small house, away from him. He wanted his space. He wanted to stomp around in his big house on the hill, surrounded by lawn.

He liked to sit on his big lawnmower, his face beet-red from last night's drinking. Everyone was afraid of him. His new wife – scarcely older than Ann – with her high voice. His new children, who came to visit a couple of times a week. He was a dreadful bully, her father, Ann said. Everyone was afraid of him. She was afraid.

She had something of his violence, she said. Last year, she'd hit a man, punched him, right in the face. A shop assistant. He was rude to her, so she punched him, and he sat down in shock. Another assistant rushed to lock the doors and pull a metal shutter down. Ann was trapped in the shop, the sole customer, and they called the police.

She thought, then, of her father in the asylum. In a real padded cell. A real straitjacket. Was she, too, going mad? Another day, she found herself driving very fast on the dual carriageway, undertaking cars on the inside lane. She was full of fury, she said. It came from nowhere. She heard sirens, she said. There was a chase, she and the police.

She pulled up on the hard shoulder and they tested her for drink and drugs. But she was sober, she said. Sober and very calm. She had anger issues, they told her in court. She had to go on an anger management course.

On the course, they did roleplay exercises, and talked about their feelings, sat in a circle. The course leader took her aside and told her she needed counselling. Her G.P. put her in touch with a counselling service that used an office in the annex of a Didsbury church.

She thought of killing herself, she told the counsellor. She didn't want to turn out like her dad. She thought of killing him, in his house on the hill. She'd be doing the world a service, she said. She should kill him and then kill herself. No more violence, she said. No more madness. Her counsellor said nothing. He was a Rogerian counsellor: they didn't intervene.

But she was too tired to kill anyone now, she said in the cellar. She didn't feel well.

We sat on an old mattress. It was damp. There was dust in the air. The cellar was only partially lit and only partially in use. The light in our room flickered on and off. A loose connection.

Ann told me about the bloodstained mattress on which she used to sleep. It was covered in blood, her blood. She shuddered. There were boxes of my landlord's books in the cellar. I opened one, idly. A hardback Zohar, in three volumes. Now that's a rare book, I told Ann. Ann said she didn't read books. She hadn't read anything. The Philakolia, in an old paperback. A dozen books by Thomas Merton. 

Sometimes, she thought she was going mad, Ann said. Would she know she was mad when she went really mad? Sometimes, she couldn't control herself. She just snaps … She gets very angry. She goes blind with rage. Afterwards she feels terrible remorse. She just wants to kill herself. Sometimes she curls herself up beneath her kitchen table and thinks of death.

Everyone's mad, she says. One of her tenants has gone mad, she says. She won't answer her door. She's not paying the rent. How was Ann going to get her out? She phoned her: no answer. She put a note through her door: I know what you're going through. Let's talk. No reply.

She knocked on the door, at first gently, then more loudly. Her tenant was inside, Ann was sure of it. Finally, she unlocked the door, opened it and called inside. Nothing. It was dark in the hallway. Ann didn't want to go on. Suddenly she was afraid she'd see a body hanging from the light fixing. She was afraid she'd find a blue corpse in the bed, a turned over bottle of pills beside her. She stepped back and closed the door, shuddering.

But later, ear pressed against her floor, Ann thought she heared sounds from downstairs. A kettle being boiled. The clatter of cutlery. Someone was alive down there. Ann felt angry. She was being hoodwinked. She jumped up and down on her wooden floor. She stomped up and down her living room. She was being ripped off.

She thought of calling her gangster friend. She thought of her muscly old boyfriend. She would have sent him down. She wouldn't send me down, she said. I wasn't the type. I didn't look threatening. She thought of putting some lit newspaper through the letter box, of smoking her out.

She thought of her father, in his house on the hill. She thought of her father's young wife with her piping voice. She thought of her father's two young children, whom she had barely seen, her half-brother, her half-sister. She thought of her sister, addicted to heroin. She thought of her brother, who had a nose like hers before her surgery.

And she thought of herself, lost in the middle of her life, not knowing what to do or where to go, but fearing she was losing her sanity. Rage built in her and fell away. She clenched her fists till they went white. She stomped again. She shouted. She played The Kinks very loudly. Then she played Seal to calm down.

She had a shower, and sang along to Seal as she washed. Then she wept, she couldn't help but weep. The pity of it all. The pity of her, going mad in her flat. Who was she? What did she want? She thought of what her counsellor said when he broke his silence: You're a good person. She was a good person. Her counsellor was a bit in love with her, though. He said as much. Her business partner was a bit in love with her, she said. Was I a bit in love with her?, she said, looking at me. I said nothing. Her eyes were very big, her body elfin.

She was a good person, she repeated. She was getting ill, she said. Maybe it was because she was good. Because she was so good. It's very hard to be good in this world, she said.

Her mother remarried, she said. The new husband was very nice. Ann and he got along. He helped her with her projects. They were going to convert her flat into two smaller flats. Then she was going to turn her tenants out of her Stockport house and live there. That was her plan. She always had plans, she said.

What she couldn't stand about this flat was the distance from the bedroom, her high bedroom, to the bathroom. It was too far. She pissed in a bowl, she said, like an old fashioned chamber pot, and carry it downstairs. She felt so tired, she didn't have a choice. But it was disgusting, really disgusting. She disgusted herself, pissing in her washing up bowl, high in her room.

But it was too far to come all the way down the stairs, across the hallway and through the living room to the bathroom. The flat was laid out the wrong way, anyway, she could see that. Up in her high room, she planned to knock down walls and put up new walls to change its layout. It was big, very big, and it needn't be so. Subdivision, that's what she wanted. Getting two flats out of one.

They were going to put a straitjacket on her, one day, she knew that. They still had straitjackets. They were going to put her in a padded cell. They still had those, too, she said. She was going to be sectioned. The police, when they caught up with her, treated her like a madwoman. The shop assistant whom she hit said that he, too, had mental problems. It was his parents, he'd told her in the backroom of the shop. It was my parents, she told him, and he didn't press charges.

In court, she had admitted she sometimes lost control of herself. She's mad, they all thought, the judge and the magistrates. And that's what her tenant thought, who was from New Zealand. That's what her Kiwi tenant thought: my landlady's mad, quite mad, so I won't have to pay rent. She's mad, the tenant thought, so I can be mad, too.

All this in the cellar, sitting, the two of us, on the mattress, she at one end, leaning against the wall, me at the other. Everyone's going mad, Ann said. Everyone will go mad in the end, she said. Nick Berry was looking down at us. Nik Kershaw in a roll top jumper. Howard Jones with his shock of hair. The pair from Tears For Fears, covered in make-up.

Ann dreamt of making me up. I would look great with make-up, she said. My eyes. My lips. I had bigger lips than she did. Bigger eyes. You'd make a great woman, she said. She liked Tears for Fears, Ann said. Their later stuff. It was very well produced. Sowing the Seeds of Love and all that. She knew something about production. Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos, that's well produced as well, she said. She and her brother were listening to it the other day whilst they were doing the painting. And Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars, by Edie Brickell …

I was a good person, she thought. Like her. Like her brother.

Then she was crying. She was crying uncontrollably. Mel & Kim looked on. A permed Kylie Minogue looked on. Madonna in black and white, with sharp cheekbones and a hat. Three volumes of the Zohar on top of the box. The Mertons. The paperback Philokalia. Where were we? At the bottom of the world. Deep beneath the world.

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'.

Sometimes, a director will make use of continuity shots in a film – shots that divide scenes of action. Shots, then, that are not scenes at all, but only resting places, non-incidents that have no real place in the storytelling. Of course, we barely notice them, these shots. They are supposed to blend in with what happens before and after them. They set a scene, or carry something over from a previous scene; they are supposed to be nothing in themselves.

But imagine this, the poet says. Imagine a shot that would break such continuity. Imagine those moments that couldn't be gathered into a narrative. Shots of discontinuity. Discontinuity shots: now the narrative is broken. Now the story is broken, it shows its joints. The story is unjoined, showing that it was ever thus, that no story was ever whole, unbroken.

You cauterise a wound to close it, burning it to draw its edges together. But is there a kind of fire that belongs to a wound that can never be closed? Will o'wisps. St Elmo's fire. Or the aurora borealis, burning coldly in the sky.

'I think there is something disclosed to the weak, to the very weak', the poet says. 'I think they see something that is broken in the world. Is that what I would have told Ann, if I could have phoned her? Is that what I would have said in the message I left on her answering machine? But how can you tell a story that never reached a beginning?

'We speak of failure, but that is too easy. We can become content with failure; and besides, the very notion of failure it gives creedence to the idea of success.

'There are some stories we cannot tell. Perhaps they tell themselves in their own way. Then the events we might relate do not matter at all – or rather, what matters does so by way of them. What is important, then, is not what is told – this incident, that, but something else, something for which those events, and even the story itself, stands in.

'Moments pass – how could they do otherwise? But we remember them in their passing; in terms of what came next, or what came before. But what of the moment without succession? This moment, now', the poet says. 'Right now. And now, too – and now. How will you record that? How will you put that in your interview?'

My writing projects, the poet says. The Dane wants to know about my writing projects. About my writing tasks. My God, a writing task … a writing project … Do you have no idea at all? A writing task … Only the Dane could have a writing task! Only the Dane a writing project! A state-sponsored writing project!

My writing projects. Do you think I ever had a writing project? Do you think I could dream of a writing future? As though writing deserved any attention! As though writing was in any way important! I will never understand that, as a Dane, the poet says, the way in which writing is unimportant, even contemptible. Writing should come last of all in your concerns. Last, bottom of the list. Writing is the least of things, the poet says, the very least.

In Indian traditions, you are supposed to have lived a full life as a householder before you can become a wandering ascetic, a sanyasin. A full life: you will have worked and married and raised children, and seen them through their education and their marriages, and only then can you contemplate the wandering life, the life of a mendicant on a holy mission.

Of course, there are some, like Adi Sankara, who forewent the life of a householder. As a young man, he begged his mother's permission to become an ascetic, and as a young man, he wandered forth, a sanyasin and a scholar.

When do you think you should begin to write? When you have lived a full life? When you have experienced things you can now recount? Write about what is closest to you, they tell you. Write about what you know. Then you should wait until you know something before you write. Until you know something of life!

Do I suppose he, the poet, knows something of life? Do I suppose that he led a full life before he wrote? Am I expecting pearls of wisdom from my lips? Insight into the writing process? Into the mechanisms of creativity? – What? What wisdom am I looking for? What do I want to learn?

Why is the Danish government funding his interview and translation project, the Dane? Why are Danish tax-dollars being used for such an endeavour? As though he had lived through something, and had something to share, the poet says. As though he had lived a life, a real life, before he began to write.

In truth, he's never lived, the poet says. He never lived and never had a sense of what it was to live. He's been waiting, the poet says. He waited too long, and now he knows there is nothing but waiting.

There's no such thing as life, the poet says, that's what he's learned. That's his wisdom. Life is unbearable, and there is no such thing as life: tell that to the Danish government, he says. Tell that to Danish tax-payers, My God.

Writing projects. What does he know of writing projects?, the poet says. Writing spasms, yes. Writing surges, yes. Making a real mess on the page, oh yes. Soiling the page, yes. Soiling himself on the page, yes. Soiling others with what he's written on the page, yes to that, too.

He's a soiler of pages! A vandal! A besmircher! Luckily, it affects almost no one. Who's interested? Do you think anyone out there is interested? – 'Are you interested, really, Dane? Is the Danish government really interested? Are the Danish tax-payers really interested?' No, no one's really interested, and that's what saves him, the poet says. Poetry means nothing at all over here, he says, and that, for him, is a relief.

Nothing at all! Nothing to anyone! Who reads, really reads poetry? He can't read it, the poet says. He has no idea how to read it. Admiring his poetry collection, yes. Reading translators' notes and editors' introductions, why not? But reading poetry on the page? Reading poetry – just poetry?

He hasn't got the patience, he says. He hasn't the right experience of time. No one has, except perhaps in Mitteleuropa. In Mitteleuropa, Old Europe, real Europe, people are still reading poetry. It matters, poetry. They eat black pudding and read poetry. They drink beers in taverns and read poetry. They bump into each other on the street and talk poetry.

It's part of their lives, the poet says, in a way we cannot imagine. To the Mitteleuropean, poetry is part of life, part of breathing. It's a right, a need. You have to read, and poetry. Everyone must read poetry, and have his opinion about poetry. There are even fevered debates about poetry, about this poet or that poet.

We can't imagine it. He can't imagine it, him, the so-called poet who is really only a non-poet. I travelled in the wrong direction with my Danish tax-dollars, the poet says. I should have traveled East and nor West. South and not along. Mitteleuropa! I should have flown into Vienna, and caught the train from there to Slovenia, or something. To Macedonia. To Hungary – above all, to Hungary. I should have strode off across the Great Hungarian Plain in search of poetry, he says.

But instead, what happened to me? Where did I come? To Manchester, of all places. To his door, of all places. To where the fire of poetry has long burned out. To where the ashes are scattered, completely scattered. There is no fire, the poet says. Perhaps there never was a fire, he has no idea. We come not so much after poetry as after the aftermath of poetry. After any idea there was any such thing as poetry. He has no idea of anything about poetry, the poet says. He above all!

Once there were Sankara-like poets, the poet says. Once there were poets who plunged straight into writing. Rimbaud, the poet says. The divine Rimbaud. Lautreamont. I must know the names, at least. They had exhausted life! They'd already lived it! Sankaras all. Do you think they were interviewed? Did Danish interviewer-translators follow them about?

They were spared that, at least, the poet says. Ah, they were already old, they'd already lived and died. The sanyasin is not reborn in life, but dies to it. A funeral pyre is built, but not lit. The would-be sanyasin climbs upon it and closes his eyes. He's dead. Dead to the world, to himself, to his family. He leaves nothing behind. His possessions have long been given away. His marriage was annulled. He has bid goodbye to his children. He is a dead man, alive in his death. He'll wander the world as a dead man.

So Rimbaud – dead-in-life at thirteen. So Lautreamont - dead-alive at nineteen. They wandered the world, and wandered the page in poetry. They were writing-wanderers, already dead. We can't imagine it, the poet says. Great prodigies appear and disappear in our midst, and we hardly know it. Rimbaud. Lautreamont. He repeats the names like a mantra. Rimbaud, Lautreamont. My God, Dane, have you any idea … His voice trails off. Do you have any notion …

'How indecent we are', the poet says. 'How lacking in discretion. We do not know enough to be silent. We have no idea how to keep wisdom. We talk and talk – listen to me, talking and talking, when what we need is silence. We need time', the poet says, 'and silence. Only then might we read. Only then – perhaps, perhaps – might we even write. Writing, writing, what can it mean to us?'

He imagines Rimbaud in Africa, disembarking at Aden, heading out to Harar on the train, then travelling by pony and cart, unfamiliar languages being spoken all around him. He imagines Lautreamont arriving in Paris, sitting in a cafe, half-listening to the swell and surge of speech around him.

He carried silence with him, the poet says. He had silence in his pockets and on his tongue. He kept his mouth shut, and his hands still. He didn't need to write. He had no concern with writing. If he wrote – if he deigned to jot down a few lines – it was after everything else, at the end of the day, when there was nothing left to do. Nothing left for a dead man to do.

So he wrote, he set down a few lines, he amused himself as a god would amuse himself, neglectfully, half-caringly. He played with words. He let them play. His writing hand glided over the page. My God, he could write anything at all! He was a God in writing. He was a demi-God, a demi-urge. The power of creation surged through him, but it was nothing to him.

He wrote in perfect neglect. Wrote as a child might yawn. Wrote like a man wading through long grass. Wrote like a mother swift feeds its young on the wing. It was ease itself. Grace. All light. It was lightness. It was a fire balloon, rising. It was the haze above summer meadows. Summer midges. Grasshoppers' song.

He wrote like a child singing to itself. It was lightness on the page. He wrote because he could, like a God. He made. He shaped. He recast his poem-prose. Paragraphs lined up. And there it was: a book. A book, one book: what did it matter? What did his life matter?

And if he wrote another book, it was only to say the first did not matter, and that nothing mattered, and that he was a God and he was a dead man and that it was time to lie down, to lie down for a second time, this time, perhaps, really dying; this time, really lighting the flames.

'How foolish we are', the poet says. 'We're idiots, idiots …' His voice trails off. To think he, the poet, the non-poet, wrote! To think he thought he could write, the desecrator of poetry! He should have read, instead. Should have bent his efforts upon reading. Should have tried to read, instead.

Rimbaud. Lautreamont. But he wrote, he wrote. What a sin! He wrote, never having lived, and never having died to life. He wrote even before he could become a householder. Even before he married and raised children and seen them married in turn.

He never lived!, said the poet. Somehow or another, he forgot to live. Won't I shoot him in the head? Won't I hang up a noose for him, at least? It would only be right. Only fair. Enough, the poet says. It's enough. But the dictaphone's running, and he's still speaking. He can't shut up. He talks and talks, like an idiot.

Kill me now, that's what he's really saying. Kill me, can't I hear it? Won't I take his neck in my Scandinavian hands and squeeze it tight? Won't I crack his windpipe? Won't I butt my great head into his and smash his nose and smash out his teeth?

Rimbaud and Lautreamont, he says. Rimbaud and Lautreamont.

White light, white light. He has a terrible headache just thinking about it, the poet says. White light! Light in light, light lost in light. As bright as phosphorous. So bright you can see nothing by it except brightness, a perfect inversion of the deepest night.

How abstracted it seems. How blank. A great blind eye. The blind eye of a blind god, watching, seeing nothing. Watching, the god gone blind, gone mad, the god having torn our his eyes, his tongue. The god who ripped himself up like a telephone directory. The god in flakes of light, raining down. The god like the million eyes that open on sunlit water, dazzling, dazzlingly blind.

How can he, the poet, the non-poet, bear it?, he says. He can't bear it any longer. It's driven him mad. He has a headache, a terrible headache. The pressure. – 'Do you have any idea of the pressure, Dane?' He thinks he's head's going to shatter. It's going to break apart in a hundred pieces, and then what will happen to my interview? Before whom else will he wave his dictaphone around? His friends? But he doesn't have any friends. He's driven them away. The light's driven them away. The light in his head. His dreadful migraines.

Who can bear to be around him? He drove them away, in order to save them, the poet says. For their own good! For their salvation. Lest he take them down with him. Lest he take them down and suffocate them. Lest the plastic bag of his company was tied around their neck. Lest their last breaths could be seen, hollows in plastic. A plastic-coated face. A plastic-coated cry, oh God, he had to spare them. He drove them away.

His headaches, his dreadful headaches. He foreswore red wine and cheese, tomatoes and chocolate, but it still wasn't enough. He foreswore white white and coffee, dairy products and wheat products, but there was no escaping it. The light bore down upon him. The light drilled down, it drilled into his forehead.

That's where it's turning, the poet says, in his forehead. As though his forehead was the tip of a great cone that spread up and out and as wide as the sky. As though it were the whole sky concentrating himself into his forehead, pouring down.

It's too much. There's too much light, he says. It's killing him. He's going mad, quite mad. He doesn't feel anything anymore, can I understand that? He doesn't feel anything … he lacks himself, he lives minus himself. All feeling, all mood. Catatonia – is that it? Apathy, anyway. Shut-down. He's shut down and shut out, all on his own. Who are you going to interview when I finally go mad?, he wonders. Who, when I'm tired recording everything he says? Oh monotony. Apathy! Apathy, apathein, no moods, no moods.

Stories, instead. He wants to tell me stories. Anything. Anything to – distract me. To distract him, too. As though stories were a kind of shelter against light. A little darkness. – 'A tent of darkness to pull around us, you and me, Dane. Because we need some shelter. We need light, God knows. God knows we're alone enough in this world. Separated enough'.

He's terribly alone, says the poet, but how could it be otherwise? He drove them away, for their own good, all the others. But in truth, they were disinclined to stay. They hardly had to be driven. Didn't they just wander off by themselves? Weren't they going away anyway? He laughs.

Off they went, off he went. He followed his own direction. He led himself, blindly. Perhaps they all did. They all set off, each in their own direction. He laughs. To each, his own direction. To everyone except the Dane, who follows everyone else's direction. Follows everyone else and with his stupid dictaphone.

Stories, stories, says the poet. As though they were a way of silencing it, the roaring. Do I hear it, the roaring?, the poet says. It's as bad as the light. He can't hear himself think. He can't hear anything he says. That's why he has to bellow and shout, do I see? The noise, oh God.

It's worse than the students upstairs, he says. Worse than their stomping up and down the stairs, their eternal rumpus. Worse than the student flats either side of him (he thinks they're student flats). The noise, the real noise comes from the sky, he thinks, the poet says. From the sky, the whole sky, like light, like the white light.

Only sometimes he supposes it comes from a specific point in the sky. A kind of quasar. A point-source from which it is beamed out to him. At him. At him, the poet, the non-poet. It drills into his forehead from a million light-years away. Drills into it, sent a million years ago and from a million light-years away.

It hurts, the poet says. Do you understand that? He wants a little silence. Wants a least a lessening of the noise, if there can be no silence. He likes to listen to the conversations of others on the bus. To bus-chatter, to the to-and-fro. Anything so as not to be alone. Not to be alone with the noise, the noise.

Still, it's not as bad when he's inside. When he's in his flat, for example. In his bedroom, in his armchair. The noise lessens. It can't quite reach him here. He can read, or try to read. He used to write – or what he called writing. To write a few lines, here and there … A little silence. A little less noise, that's all he wanted.

He has dreamt of creatures – gods or salamanders – who live like noise within noise, like light within light. That's what he sees in his headaches, he says. That's what he hears. Roaring within the roaring. Gods' voices. Salamanders'. They're shouting something to him. He has to hear, but he can't quite hear. He can't make it out, the message intended for him. Because the noise is splitting his head apart. The noise driving down like a white axe, through his skull, the centre of his skull. The blade of noise slicing down, right through him, dividing him into two.

He's being cauterised by noise, he says. Burned along his edges. Sometimes he thinks he's falling, falling in light and noise. He sees a body, once dark and closed upon itself, pinned open, drawn. A spread out body like a page, with no secrets, nothing hidden.

He's nothing inside him, the poet says. No interiority. No space for secrets. The gods – the salamanders – know everything about him, every thought. They can see it – that's how he imagines it. They can see and hear everything he thinks, he feels it.

My God, how they torment him, his gods, his salamanders. Writhing around him. Turning around him like great porpoises. Beasts made of starlight. Of sheets of noise. Turning around him, quicker and quicker. Sometimes approaching. Sometimes touching him with a fiery limb which passes right through him. Screams. Screams that pass right through him. That's their way of talking, the poet says. That's how they would address him: by screams.

He's a white page, the poet says. A white point, like a planet in the middle of a supernova, its atmosphere blasted away, its creatures dead. A blasted planet, rock, just rock, the shell that survived the nova's blast. A shell, a husk, and with nothing at its core. For his centre has been blasted away, too. His centre, his secrets, his ordinary life. The man he was.

Was he really that – a man? Him – a man? He thought he was some crippled thing, grown in a lab. A stunted thing. A thing torn apart. Thought he was some experimental subject. Thought he was the trial case for new kinds of torture. Thought they were trying to invent a different kind of pain. White pain. Noise pain. The roaring, roaring, like television fuzz. Roaring, to say: programme over. No signal here. Nothing can get through. Roaring. Fuzz.

He used to turn the volume of the television right up. And his radio – his radios, because there's one in his bedroom, too, and a little portable one in the kitchen. He'd turn them up, right up. Now everything was roaring! The needles went into the red. The volume went up to 11.

Too much noise! Too much distortion! They told him to turn it down, the students, - he, the poet, the non-poet, a regular citizen, told to be quiet by students. They banged on his door. They had to bang a great deal, over and over, until he heard. Until it sounded where his heart used to be, thump-thump.

When he answered the door, they were dazzled by the light. He left all the lights on in his flat, he says. He screwed in the brightest bulbs and left them on, in his light and roaring phase, he said. He dazzled them, they who were used to light, who had the light and airy upstairs flat, while he had the dark downstairs flat. And he wondered whether his body had begun to emit light, too. Whether he was turning into a salamander. He roared at them, the students, like a salamander.

Anyway, the police came, and told him to turn the noise down, so he did. You can't argue with police, the poet says. The police are in league with the salamanders, he says. They're their minions, their servants. They might appear to be the opposite of light and noise, but in fact, they're needed; they, too, have their role.

He was quiet, after that. He hid in the darkness, under the bedsheets. It took him a long time to come out. They weren't going to draw him out. He needed to rest.

Madness is very tiring, the poet says. Very, very tiring. It keeps you up all night and through all the nights and then drops you, exhausted. You fall to earth. Fall back to yourself. You're exhausted! Madness dropped you down the mineshaft. Madness dropped you down its liftshaft, and there you are at the bottom, in the pit, the poet says.

Ah, how can he explain it?, he says, growing quieter. Danes are sane, he knows that. Terribly sane! The police are sane, too, he says. Perhaps I, too, am a servant of the light and noise, in some way. Perhaps I, too, am in league with the salamanders.

Ah, he's calming down, the poet says. My presence has excited him too much, he says. He's not really used to company. Not anymore, since his friends deserted him. His so-called friends. Or he deserted them, whichever it was, he says. 'And I awoke and found me here on cold hill's side', the poet says. That's poetry, you know. – 'And I awoke – all alone – on the cold hill', he says. Because that's where he is, he says. On the cold hill, all alone.

'It's cold, terribly cold, the poet says. And we're so alone, so alone. Even you, Dane: alone. We're wretches, perfect wretches …' What are the gods trying to tell us? What are they shouting? And the salamanders, who are part gods – or are the gods part salamander?: what do their screams mean? And the light, the terrible blinding light: what does it mean, Dane? Can I help him? What on earth does it mean?

'What do you mean, Dane? What is your meaning? Who sent you here? What are you recording?'

When did he begin to write? What a question! A Danish question, the poet says. The Dane is concerned with tasks and projects! With beginnings and outcomes! The Dane is a natural auditor, a bureaucrat of the spirit, the poet says.

And so a Dane, his Dane, his translator-Dane, his interviewer-Dane wants to know when he began to write! When he began to write … my God!, the poet says, shaking his head. When he began to write!

Is this what they teach you in interviewing-school in Denmark?, he asks. When it all began! When it began, as if there were a simple beginning that didn't carry with it a thousand non-beginnings. As if there was a yes that hadn't been shouted down by a thousand nos!

Have you any idea, Dane, of what it means to fail to begin? Or, just this: to fail. To fail, Dane, and from the first. To fail and have no idea of anything but failure, and your failure in particular, your dreadful, fact-like failure. You will fail: so the fact. You have failed, and you will always fail: so the fact.

Do you know what it's like for failure to bellow itself into your eardrums? My God, and to see only failure, your own failure, the world doing nothing but reflecting back your failure?

How he has failed, the poet says, but it's no use explaining it to the Dane. The Dane can have no understanding of the depths of failure. Of the extent of failure. Imagine a wall as high as the sky, the poet says. Imagine running against it, over and again. Running against, breaking yourself, and getting up only to run against it again, my God!

Imagine a corpse, waking up, lying there, still a corpse, and thinking to itself: I am a corpse. Imagine it: a corpse, already dead, but somehow given life, a little life, a life sufficient to lie there and think: I am a corpse.

How many times has he awoken and, lying there, thought: Is this it? Is this the morning? Is this awakening? Is this what I've woken into? Light everywhere? The indecency of light, showing everything? Showing his failure? Showing him as a corpse, and as nothing but a corpse?

A corpse awake and thinking: I am a corpse. I am a dead man. Why am I alive? Why doesn't someone kill me? Waking as if at the bottom of a chasm. At the bottom of a mineshaft, body broken, forgotten. Waking only to die. No: waking into the desire to die, to have done with waking.

Imagine it: to be horrified by time itself, the poet says. The continuation of time. The fact that a moment will succeed this moment. It's horrible! It's a joke, a terrible joke! Time says: kill yourself, and, I won't let you kill yourself. Time says: it's finished, but I won't let you finish. Time says: I will stretch you out along myself, along all of time. Time says: I will prolong your agony, stretch it out.

And meanwhile, moment follows moment. Moment lurches into moment. Moment careens into moment. You've got your head in the noose, but no matter. You've got the gun at your temple – no matter. You've turned on the gas, but there's still too much time. Too much time, too much space, too much light, it's all the same. It's the same each time, the poet says.

When he began! When he began to write! What a question! What a Dane! What Danish optimism! It's all finished: haven't you ever had that thought?, the poet says. It's all over, and a long time ago. Somehow it hasn't reached here, the end: haven't you thought that? Somehow it hasn't got here, it hasn't arrived.

The messenger was shot. The messenger shot himself. The messenger read his message and thought, there's no point and shot himself in the head. Or hung himself. Or put his head in the oven. The message hasn't got here. The message from the walnut-sized brain at the other end of the dinosaur's body hasn't reached your walnut-sized brain. The orders from the head of the army: desert, disband, kill yourself, hasn't got here.

And in the meantime? You live like an animal half run over. Your spine is broken, you flay about, but still you live. Dazed, you live. Concussed, skull broken. Bits of your skull beaten into your brain: and you're alive. Half dead in a pit, looking upwards: alive.

My God, what mockery: alive. What does God think, when he looks in your eyes?: Alive. Alive: this word spoken in bubbles of blood. Alive: this word mouthed by one whose throat was cut open. Alive: from the mouth of one half beaten to death by clubs.

There are days to get through, rather than live: do you understand that, Dane? Days like drawled syllables without shape. Days where one failed our slops greyly into another. Days that open like a gorge, plunging down and only down.

When did he begin, when did he begin to write? Begin – and to write: what a joke. Begin: already a joke. Begin …he'd never begun. Never raised his head. He's never lived in three dimensions. Crushed, he's only ever moved side to side like a snake. Broken, he never rose to look around. He's lived on one plane, pressed flat. He's only ever lived on one plane. No – only in a single point. In a single dimension. A point falling into itself, lost in itself. A little singularity, a black hole, devouring itself, tumbling into itself.

How do you paint with just one colour? How do you write a poem with only the word, no? Black painted on black. Spirals of black cut into black. The word, no, and another word, no.

Misery beyond misery! Suffering without sufferer. Suffering wandering in itself. A ghost lost in the corridors. I began to write: how could he ever use that phrase? It was last April when I began to write. I began to write ten years ago now: My God, how revolting.

If suffering was given life, if horror was given freedom, it was only to return to itself, spilling back. It was only to become necessity, to become fate and less than fate.

My God, do I think he's ever lifted his head? Even propped himself up on his elbows? Despair spread blackly like oil. Despair smeared. No release. No catharsis. It will not end well. Did you hear that, Dane: it will not end well. He laughs: it's not going to end well!

'You were thinking how pretty I am', said Ann, when he fell into her trap. She said she could read minds, and when he asked her – what a fool! – what was on his mind, she said it. You were thinking how pretty I am: and what a trap, and what a fool he was.

Of course she was pretty. Everyone young is pretty, the poet says. That's how he thought of her: she was young, very young. Innocent. Innocent enough to say: You were thinking how pretty I am. Young, coquettish – and hadn't she a right to be a coquette? Young, very young: she had every right. All the rights were on her side, and none on his.

He said nothing, did nothing. They walked further along the river. Further, the afternoon all around them. Further, and his stomach turned, he felt terribly ill, he wanted to sink down. And that's what he said: 'I feel terribly ill'.

I feel terribly ill, he said, like an idiot. He had been given something. A door had opened. Light flashed through the sky. Him, it was up to him. Beauty was passing by on a summer afternoon. Beauty – and not merely prettiness – was flashing by.

You can be pretty – beautiful – enough to feel a responsibility towards your beauty. What does it deserve?, you might ask yourself, looking in the mirror. What is its due? It is as if beauty led its own life, its own fate. That it wandered through this world, our world, according to its own unguessable lights.

What beauty can ever say to herself: I am beautiful? Who could ever admire the tapering of her own limbs or the brightness of her face? You owe your beauty to Beauty. Your beauty is only the way Beauty travels through our world. Your beauty is not yours. You cannot own it, or keep it to yourself. It travels, passing. It is passing now.

He once read the story of a Buddhist nun who, singled out for her beauty, held a hot iron to her face. Beauty was her trial – it was like a light constantly shining upon her; she wanted to sink into anonymity, to be no one in particular. But in a sense, the anonymity she sought was already part of beauty. It is not hers; she does not possess it, and it is as though it wandered ahead of her, opening doors and windows, leading her on.

Clear the way!, beauty announces, like the flag waver who walked out ahead of the earliest steam engine to warn of its coming. Clear the way: and so a face in a nightclub might open like a woodland glade, all light. Clear the way; and so a limb – an outstretched arm – points along itself to God.

Beauty is anonymous, the poet says. Beauty has nothing to do with the one who is touched by beauty. Touched – and been left behind by it, too. Touched – until beauty begins to soften and disperse itself across the face. Until it begins to lose itself in a mist through which, for a time, it shines with a great benevolence.

But in the meantime, today (that day, back then), Ann's eyes having been marked out in eyeliner and mascara? Today, when her eyes have becoming something to be watched as the most delicate register of passing mood?

When she looked at him, he felt a roaring in his ears, he said. He wanted to pick up a sharp object and stab himself, he says, so he could be done with it. He wanted to slice his arm with his own keys. It was unbearable.

But when she looked away, it was also unbearable. As though the whole world had turned away from him. He was lost, cast out. He was a fallen angel. A moment ago, just then, he had had his chance, and now …

His chance, his chance: he pictured for himself another life, another way of living. In another, brighter world he is with Ann. With her: but what does that mean? With Ann … in a relationship: but what would that mean, to be in a relationship? What would beauty want with him, anyway?

But beauty would want nothing from him. He'd seen something, some secret; he'd caught it out. It had shone for him in Ann's face. It had flashed out at him, for him. And in his other life, with great thanks, he would have stepped up to honour what he saw. To honour it, to encircle it, to touch Ann's hands because they were beauty's hands, to look into her eyes because they were the eyes of beauty.

In another life … But in this life? Nothing was to happen. The threshold quivered. The afternoon was an open door. But he stepped back, retreated. He had to. It was his duty, his mission. 

What had they been talking about? Everything, nothing. All of their lives – the whole of their lives, each of them, freely and openly – neglectfully – as you can do with a stranger, with someone who doesn't know you.

You can speak as you would dream, like river plants under the water, bowing to the current. You can bow to something, submit to it, to your own story, to your portion of fate, to what has happened so far.

This is what has happened, you can say, but lightly, almost indifferently. This is it, but neglectfully, as you might pick a piece of flowering grass and chew it for a moment. A green taste. Spit it out. As you might let your hand brush the clock of a dandelion. Feathery spores in the air. As you might hold a branch of bramble aside for a fellow walker. Be careful!

Yes, that's how they spoke, on the threshold. That was it, the sky open above them like an open door. He could say anything, anything at all. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

He had Ann to himself. They had the afternoon to themselves. Nothing was planned, nothing was to happen. Dinner time was far off. The evening – what were they going to do with their evenings? The next day – anything could happen tomorrow, for those who barely worked. Anything tomorrow and the day after that.

All the days were there, at the threshold. All the incomplete and incompletable days. But he let himself be led into a trap, didn't he? He wandered into it, the gentlest of traps, the kindest of bullets. He should have fallen deliriously. He should have let himself be caught by catching her, by placing his arms around her. By kissing her – could he imagine that? By kissing her.

You're thinking how pretty I am. How pretty: and when she said that, the afternoon, and all afternoons, came to an end. How pretty, how pretty … he laughs.

'For a long time, I was ill, you know that by now', the poet says. 'For a long time, ill, ill and unemployed, and I fell from of the world. I was silent, by and large. Do you know what it means to be silent, to say nothing?

'I said nothing. I watched the TV with the volume turned down. Nothing happened around me. The TV. Quiet voices. The voices of the people who delivered my meals talking to one another.

'The cleaner's voice. – "Are you in?" Of course I was in. I was always in. But I kept quiet. I kept silence to myself. Besides, I'd forgotten what it meant to speak. To coincide with myself in speaking.

'I wasn't sure words belonged to me. That I was entitled to them, words, as others were. The word, I, for example: how was I to say that? It felt quoted, on my lips. Quoted – as though I was borrowing it from someone else.

'Once, it was possible for me to say the word, I. But now? There was nothing to say. No word belonged to me. What could I report of the world? I could barely distinguish foreground and background, the important from the non-important.

'Nothing emerged to be said. Nothing needed to be spoken. Was I hungry? No. Did I thirst? No again. Was I warm? I was warm. Did I have a shelter over my head? I had shelter. What more did I want?

'The same, I lived in the same. One day seemed to sink into another. One week – into another. The same event – going to the kitchen for a glass of water, a trip to the bathroom – seemed to take place in series.

'I had been here before. I would be here again. What's the opposite of deja vu? The future would be the same as my present, my past. The future: the return of the same. Again, again'.

'I was waiting – is that the word?', the poet says. 'I waited to get better. But my waiting got lost on the way to its object. Ill, what could I conceive of getting better? How was I to conceive of that: recovery, when it was incommensurable with my illness?

'Waiting lost its object. I was no longer waiting for anything. I no longer hoped. There was no one there to hope.

'No longer was it a matter of regretting the time I might have had for something else – of what I had lost by waiting. For that would still presume my having time to accomplish this or that task, or to dream of further projects. But to fall from time, to wait without waiting for anything in particular, meant that time could be neither lost nor gained.

'Stagnancy: time was going nowhere. I was waiting – but for what?

'Time without project. Superflous time, that lacks its sense.

'Sometimes I wanted to wake myself into a sense of urgency. How old am I?, I asked myself. What date is it? I thought to keep a record of the passing of days; a diary. Thought I could write a few lines for each day.

'Futility: this task, like all others, wore away from itself', the poet says. 'This project, like all others, failed before it began. Why would I desire to leave my mark behind? Why should I seek to line up my days?

'Nothing is to happen here, I said to myself in my flat. Nothing is to gather itself into an event'.

'There is a kind of exhaustion which reaches the limits of strength. A limitless limit', the poet says, 'because it never quite comes to an end, and this is its trial. The exhausted one cannot ask when exhaustion will end'.

Ill, unemployed, how can he conceive of the end of exhaustion? In the end, he was made of it, exhaustion; he was nothing apart from it. He was simply exhaustion thickened up; tiredness living a human life.

'That was my life. That was what was left of me. I could not begin. And that's what I lived, this non-beginning. Nothing, in my flat, rose above its own ruin. Nothing began that did not also bring with it the impossibility of beginning, that was not also thickened by it, encumbered.

'Nothing was finished. Nothing began. And this is the secret', the poet says. 'It hasn't happened yet, what did so back there. It isn't finished. Do you understand that? Can you understand what I mean?

'Ann. The river. Jackson's Boat. It never really happened', the poet says. 'None of it. Not that it is fictional, or that I'm lying to you, but that – it was never finished. It was never rounded off. It wasn't allowed to happen, the poet says. It wasn't supposed to.

'And today? Now? There is no "today". No "now". Is that your role, the poet wonders, 'to bring it to an end? To write it up, our interview, and let it live for the first time? To let me live?' He fell asleep, the poet says. He fell asleep in life. And am I going to wake him up?'

The other night he caught sight of himself in the mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet, the poet says. Caught sight in the door opened and turned to face the hallway, and his body coming up the hallway (it wasn't far: a single step, a step and a half).

What did he see? A grey teeshirt, a face, and darkness behind. A teeshirt and a face, unexpectedly. It was his body in the corridor, it was him – it took a moment to see that. Coming up the corridor, one step, another – a moment and an interstice between moments.

He saw his face, his body coming towards itself as he came closer. But whose face was this? Whose body? If he reached out, how could he be sure that his fingers would touch his own image?

Only the man who lives alone thinks these things, the poet says. There are some things that reveal themselves only to the solitary.

The other day, he says, he returned to the flat and hardly knew where he was. The quiet flat, and no noise through the ceiling. Quiet, the wooden floorboards exposed and the room very big. Bigger than usual, he thought. It would take time to cross this room, he thought, although usually you could cross it in two strides.

Nothing was happening. Nothing – but it seemed to thicken, this nothingness. Some force of absence. Go away, it seemed to say to him. Leave me here. This is why people think they see ghosts, the poet says. It's why they think their flats are haunted. But his flat wasn't haunted. It was only itself, the same as itself. The same, the same – thickening, becoming tangible. The flesh of absence. Its shape.

He didn't want to leave, the poet says. He'd been somewhere already. He'd been out, and wanted to come home. But the flat wanted his absence. Wanted to fill itself with that: his absence. And it seemed to have grown, his living room. He'd never be able to cross it now, he thought, not with a thousand strides.

Should he leave?, he wondered. Should he go back out? Should he leave and let his absence thicken in the half-darkness? He shouldn't have been there, he thought. Shouldn't have caught it out, whatever was happening. Should have let it thicken, his absence, there where the red blind, pulled down against the light, but letting it through, tinged the whole room red.

He remembers Borges writes of a kind of labyrinth that is only a straight line, a path running forwards. The flat is leading me into itself, he thought. It leads nowhere; the flat is a dead end, a cul de sac, he thought. But that dead end, too, is a way, a kind of detour.

What was happening there? What did he surprise? Red light, through the blind. Should he stay and watch the light change? Should he wait for the day to decay, like bubbles popping on the beach after a wave had passed? Foam and seaweed, and the bubbles popping: that's what he would see. The decay of the day.

He'd caught it out, the poet says. He'd seen it. Something wanted to show itself, he says, like the smears that show on the window when light catches them. It's the same for the mirror over the mantlepiece, he says. When it's bright, very bright, you can see it has been wiped in round circles.

He thinks of Ozu's 'pillow shots' – those pauses in his films between scenes, between events and themselves. Nothing happens – and that's what happens. A cat licks its paw in the sun: nothing at all. The droop of the thick cord of a washing line, with its plastic clothes-pegs beaded with rain: nothing at all. Pillow shots: you can only see them from the corner of your eye. And something in them sees you too; something is watching behind the smeared mirror.

Sometimes he sees it in the sky, he says. In the whiteness and opacity of the sky. It seems to see, to send its gaze in all directions, although the sky does not see. It seems to reach him in its blindness, but it has no interest in him. The child feels the delighted gaze of the world upon it. Who isn't delighted by a child, a very young child? But when it is seen by the day? When the white sky sees in its blindness?

He sees it in the mirror, that same indifferent gaze, the poet says. He sees it: the gaze within his gaze. The other, his doubled body. What is it? A dead man, the poet thinks. Or at least it is not alive. But sometimes he fears that it is alive, that it lives as he does not, or that it has taken something of his life and lives it, away from him.

He thinks of what Heraclitus said about the mortals and the gods: we live each others death and die each others lives. Is it a god the poet saw in the hallway mirror? Is it a god in the blind seeing of the day, in white light? Is it his shadow, death to his life?

Standing water, stagnant water. A dawn marsh with steaming fog. The past is not still, not static, the poet says. It changes. He thinks of rusted metal, turned all colours. Of an encrusted hull in drydock. That is the richness of the past, and it is why you shouldn't keep memories, pressing them to yourself and smothering them, but allow them to be what they will be; to change. Isn't the future contained in the past, too? Isn't it already there, when it returns to you, when you allow the past to be what it is, gently neglecting it, leaving it out in all weathers?

He fell through the years. He had fallen through them, imagining them burning away what was inessential. He had been streamlined as he fell; he fell faster. In the afternoon, he went out walking. In the afternoon, the long afternoon, he was one among many, a walker among walkers. What do you want?, you might have asked him. Nothing in particular, he would have said. What do you require?, another question. No more than anyone else, he would have said. And to the question, How are you?, the lightest and most innocent of questions, he would have replied, Not too bad.

He fell through the years, keeping quiet, not saying too much. And isn't that the joy of being alone: never have to recount, for another, what happened in a day, a passage of weeks? Of what happened back then, in this relationship, or that? And then letting the days pass, weeks, without detaining them, without doubling them up in a story.

To neglect: is that what he learnt? But it was a benign neglect. He learnt to be one among others, learnt to speak without seeking attention to himself. He imposed no order on what had gone before, and on what was happening. He let events be incomplete. He left what had happened like shells on the seashore to be placed and unplaced by the sea.

And now? Now he is being made to speak. A Dane is waving a dictaphone in his face. Is there a way of allowing another part of him to speak, to speak with him? He feels a kind of tenderness for him, this other speaker. He wants to protect him even as he comes forward. He is an innocent; he lives only in the telling of this half-story, or that. He lives and dies as he belongs to an event, and to the incompleteness of an event.

A child speaks, he imagines, alongside his speaking. A distracted child, whose gaze is caught by the opening of the playing field and by the trees on the other side of the field. One day he will see his classroom from those trees. Climbing up, his school seems small and far away. And he, too, will seem small and far away. For that's what he sees: himself, his own gazing. He remembers it still, that view, the poet says. He still dreams of it. The child dreams. The child wakes up, stirs, and falls back to sleep.

When he was young, he used to daydream of being very ill, immensely ill, confined in some way, lying down … He had been reading of iron lungs in the Guinness Book of Records, he says. There was a black and white picture of the longest surviving patient in an iron lung, a man with a long, dark beard and long hair, immobile, the machine breathing for him, a small mirror above his head – what was that for? To see himself? To see something of the world reflected in it? But it was angled downwards, as far as he could tell from the picture, and would have only shown the floor, and perhaps the feet of the nurses who would walk up to him sponge his brow.

He remembers an episode from a television series about flying doctors, the poet says. They landed in their helicopters to carry a child to hospital. They lifted him tenderly from his bed to the stretcher, and then they whirled him off, an ill boy to be made better. And he remembers, too, the Little Match Girl from Anderson's fairy tale, who dies of cold, but whose soul flies up to be met by her grandmother in heaven. He can see the illustration: a little girl in rags, flying up, and then the grandmother, in a heavenly glow. 

To be sick, to be made better: a child's game. To be sick and die, and then be carried up to heaven: a game he might have played with his stuffed toys as a child, making his voice higher than it was, and seeking by way of such games, passage upstream to what had already shut him from the heart of childhood.

As a child, he already smarted at the idea that some toys were too old for him, even as his toys gradually disappeared into the loft, unplayed with and as though waiting for him to become a child again. For him, a very old man and lost in dementia, to believe himself three-and-a-half.

Toys in the loft: keepers of the heart of childhood. The arms of a teddy bear, eternally open. A box of Christmas cracker gifts, eternally worthless. A pink plastic angel fish in a finger puppet in a box. A child, cared for, needs something like a child to care for in turn. Is it because this is all such a child knows? Is it the ritual it enacts in order to be like the adults? Or is it because there is a loss of childhood at the heart of childhood, a sense of its retreat as the child grows older?

There's a line from Borges he copied onto a post it note, the poet says. Yes, there it is. Read it out.

Everyone is defined in a single instant of their lives, a moment in which a man encounters his self for always.

He's always wondered about that quotation, the poet says. Is it a question of a particular event, a particular revelation? Of a sign that would contain in minature the secret of a whole life?

But that secret is a kind of emptiness, the poet says, such as opens between the stars and the galaxies. It is a kind of openness, such as that he saw in the playing fields and beyond them. What defines us is indefinition, the poet says. The child – this particular child – becomes any child, no one in particular. A child, not the child: a name for childhood. A name for the anonymity of childhood, for the youngest child of all.

The past changes, the poet says. It's changing now. He thinks of Munch, who would paint outside even in the Swedish winter, allowing the rain to blur his colours, and the frost to freeze them fast. Sometimes he threw his paintings into the apple trees, sometimes using them as lids for his saucepans, letting them steam. He wanted to incorporate the passage of time into his paintings, to lend them what the Japanese call sabi, the patina of rust.

And what of he, the poet, as he speaks? He wants to break time from its passage. To deliver it unto what does not finish, and refuses to be narrated. He wants to find those instants in which he was lost for always, in which a child was lost into its gaze.

He fell through the years and through the streets. And even now, he is falling, the poet says. Even now, as a Dane waves a dictaphone around in front of him.

'Frost the window with your breath', the poet says. 'That was our everyday, back then: breath on glass, the becoming opaque of what was once transparent'. He thinks of Duchamp's Large Glass, which was supposed to slow the light which passed through it, to keep it. To slow light, as those days seem to slow down the story that would speak of them, and bring it close to standstill.

Something had been kept in those afternoons, in those four o'clocks, the poet says. Something was hidden there.

The afternoon, the cafe. Four o'clock: after lunch, after the lunchtime crowd, but before the evening crowd, the drinks-after-work crowd, for whom it became a bar and restaurant. Four o'clock: who knew it as a cafe, and only as a cafe? He who did not work, and who did not need to rest from work. He for whom the street, on which its chairs and tables spilled, was not on the way to anywhere.

A place to meet? At first, it was not that. He sat mute and alone, head down, reading a free paper. At first, he hardly said anything, not even to the waitresses who brought him coffee. He went there, to the cafe, to punctuate his day. It was part of its rhythm, his life, part of the turning of the day. It was necessary, at that time, to go out in order to return; necessary to make a voyage out so he felt the promise of his own solitude.

He was a regular, in short, just like the man who, each morning, would underline words seemingly at random in the cafe newspapers. The poet only heard about him, his predecessor, at secondhand. The waitresses told him, when he asked them about the faint pencil marks on the pages.

Why these words?, he asked them, when they told him about the other regular. What's he looking for? They didn't know, the waitresses. They had no idea. But if he was mad, it was benignly so; he was never any trouble, never anything but polite, just as he, the poet, was also polite.

'I'm not sure when I began to speak to the others who assembled there, at the cafe. I was drawn into conversation, I suppose. I was drawn, pulled along, my skiff finding the middle of the channel. I was part of it, part of something.

'Ah, what it is to talk, to talk of nothing in particular! Anyone is speaking, everyone is speaking: to talk about the weather, about the biggest stories on the news. About celebrities, about film stars. And now each speaker is only a relay of speech, saying nothing in particular, letting everything be said'. 

He was part of something. A scene, a group. They would read the tabloids together. Someone would bring in Chat, and they'd read that. Who didn't care about Brad and Jennifer? Everyone cared, in a distracted way; laughingly, with laughing avidity. About Brad and Jennifer and the others, about Renee Zellweger's marriage breakup, and the sting that caught Kate Moss snorting cocaine. 

Didn't everyone know Renee Zellweger's marriage would end? Didn't they know Brad and Jennifer wouldn't last? - 'We looked on at our celebrities, we cafe regulars, with wisdom and compassion. And then looked out at the world around us with wisdom and compassion. We had learned something. No: we'd had had something reconfirmed.

'We who barely worked, who were playing truant from life, could be sure of some things. Of justice: Kate Moss, after all, was caught. Of finding your level: Jennifer was aiming much too high. Of keeping your head: wasn't Renee Zellweger just a little too mad? Reassurance: we all want the same things; we need the same things: celebrities are like us, only more beautiful than we are. 

'Justice, justice. Sometimes we would talk about TV. About The O.C., for example. Everyone had a view about The O.C., which was showing as repeats every weekday morning. About confused and angry Marissa, about Summer and her love triangles. So Julie didn't poison her husband after all! So Ryan has a brother, brutishly good looking, like him, trying for the straight and narrow, like him!

'The view in the cafe was that the brother was a poor addition to The O.C. – that the programme makers were, in this case, simply throwing events at us, replaying Ryan's story, which was a very good story, with a kind of desperation. But The O.C. remained happy, laughing; and, like the events of Neighbours, which also depended upon the stability of one central family amidst the mayhem, we always knew everything would always be okay. Sandy and his wife. The room by the pool, where Ryan lived. Yes, everything would be okay again.

'The afternoons were ours, the cafe regulars. The four o'clocks. We hovered together like a swarm of midges. We moved together, banked together like a flock of swifts. To say the word, 'we': that was something. No, not to say it, not quite, but for it to be implied. 'We': those who were at the cafe. 'We': those of us, who, every weekday, would gather at the cafe'.

One afternoon – summer at its height – he went out with a waitress to the meadows. He would show her the meadows, he said, the Ees. They took some bread and pesto from the deli, and there, in the grass, in the flattened grass, she stretched her white arms and yawned.

A cafe waitress and he, out in the sun. He'd reached a plateau, he thought. He climbed the steps up to summer. But now he shouldn't be greedy, he thought. She was young, and he was – what was he? Neither young nor old. Out of it, youth, and not old yet. Out of it, and nearly outside life. On its edges, that was all, and that must be all.

Now, for a time, he could go out with a waitress to the meadows: that should be enough. He should ask for more. In the avenue of his days, in the green tunnel of his summer walks, he had a companion for a time, that was all, and she would disappear as suddenly as she had taken up with him.

It was a summer lunchdate, only that, a summer picnic, that and that only. And he succeeded. There was a small intimacy between he and her, which he never sought to expand. She had told him something of her life – a few facts, and that was enough. He knew a few things, and watched approvingly as their intimacy disappeared.

What was between them – so little – disappeared. He became anonymous again for her. More then anonymous, and to him it was like a drink of cool water. It was like dipping his head underwater. He was no one in particular. He was anyone, and no one in particular.

'To be forgotten – do you know what bliss that is? Of course not. To be forgotten, neglected …'

Can you alter the past?, the poet says. Sometimes, he would like to alter it, the past. He's frightened of the future, he says. He doesn't understand the present. But the past, now, the past …

It's growing in his memory, he says. It's coming closer to him, as though it were asking for something. Coming closer, nervously forward, like an animal that didn't quite trust him, but that wanted, still, to trust him.

For a long time, as he was getting iller, but before he moved into sheltered accommodation, he thought he would meet Ann by chance at the cafe, or on the streets. He thought he might see her outside the secondhand bookshop she liked to visit, or buying something at the Italian deli.

He anticipated running into her, smiling, and seeing her smile in turn. – 'So, how are you?' And it would take off as they left it, their not-quite-friendship, their never-yet-a-relationship. Wouldn't it be through the coincidence of a meeting that it might begin again?

They might decide to walk. She would leave her new book or her pot of pesto in the front seat of her car, and they'd set out again: that's what he imagined. We'd be off, talking, and conversation would be ease itself; they'd let their speech alight upon this, upon that. It hop about, their conversation, as bright and agile as a robin.

He wanted to leave them to chance, their encounters. He didn't want to arrange a meeting with her. He didn't want to phone or to text. Ann wasn't to feel acted upon, invaded.

He'd called her once, he say. It was a terrible mistake. Once, only once, and she sounded distant. He'd interrupted one of her activities with his phonecall, his dreadful phonecall. He saw it in his mind's eye: she'd begun some business of DIY, and there it was, her ringing phone. She pulled the phone from her pocket, spoke. 'Hello?' And it was him, just him, and what had he to say? Who was he to summon her from her tasks?

He liked her independence, and the sense of the separateness of her life from his. He liked the idea of meeting her when she was midway through some task or another. With a bag of shopping, for example, a tip of baguette poking out of her bag. She was busy, she had things on, but there she was. And there he was, who was likewise busy, likewise out on his errand, before her. A coincidence: 'how's it going?', 'fine, fine …' Light words. Frothing words that never settled, like a rushing stream. "I've been shopping …": those words like rapids, quick with light. Words that caught the light and flashed it back.

He always delighted in ordinary speech, the poet said. In exchanging politenesses. Of asking how the other person was, and replying, 'fine, thanks', when asked. What did it matter what was said, or who was saying it? Speech like an impersonal babble, a brook bubbling along, as though the aim was to help speech along without detaining it. To let a spurt of water – a word, a phrase – glint with light.

Better still, he said, was to be party to a conversation, on the verge of it, listening to the voices of others rise and fall. To hear gossip about people he didn't know. To hear rumours about unfamiliar events.

For a moment, he had the fantasy of meeting someone when he was with Ann: a friend of hers, perhaps. Of meeting the friend, and listening to Ann and her talk for a few minutes. Enjoying the flashing of their conversation, a river in sunlight.

Would she introduce him, Ann? Would she feel the need to introduce him, to place him for her friend? In his mind, she said nothing. He was there, at the conversation's edge, but remained unintroduced, part of things, but at the edge of them. And when the conversation stopped? When Ann walked away? He would walk with her. He, the poet says, would walk with her.

But Ann wasn't with him. Ann was nowhere.

The field of chance was the afternoon, the open afternoon. That's where he rolled himself like a die in the afternoon, hoping that she, another die, would be rolled in his direction. Would they meet, he and Ann? Would she appear because it was what he wanted? He asked God for it to happen. – 'Make it happen', he prayed inwardly. But he didn't believe in God, not really. But if he did see her? He'd thank God, he says. We need to invent God sometimes to have someone to thank, the poet says. Thank you, God: that's what he'd say.

But he didn't want Ann to search him out. To call him, for example. To knock on his door. He never liked visitors, he says. Even now, he doesn't like them. Especially now, with his visiting Dane and his dictaphone!

When he is alone, he likes to be no one at all, the poet says. Likes not to belong to himself. That's what he means by solitude, he says. That's how he enjoys it. Lightness, diffuseness. Being committed to nothing, holding no opinion. Paying attention to neither this nor that.

Yes, that was what he wanted when he was alone, indoors, in his flat. But outdoors? When he was outside? He used to love the street, he says. Loved walking down it, with the sense that anything might happen.

The street is open to all, the poet says, and to every kind of encounter. And the cafe, which spilled out onto the street? The meeting place above all meeting places, the poet says. That place set aside for meeting, for allowing meetings.

Was it a coincidence that they used to gather, people he knew, people he half-knew, at four o'clock in the afternoon? Four o'clock: that was the time; it wasn't pre-arranged. Four o'clock, most of the way through the day. You could have got things done. Could have a little sense of accomplishment. And now it was the time to pause and take the air. Now to stand aside from the street, although you were still a part of it, the street, but set back from it. You could rest in an inlet of the street, some place still part of its streaming, but sheltered, restful.

That's where he used to meet her, Ann. That's where they used to meet, by chance, always by chance. She would appear, and he'd be there already, sitting with others, or sitting alone. Or she would be sitting there, talking to others, and moving her bag from the chair for him to sit down.

They used to meet. And before they met – what bliss! – the anticipation of meeting. He had rolled himself across the afternoon like a die. And she, too, had rolled herself. Two sixes: they'd won. They'd both won. Everything led them to one another. Their winding paths wound no longer.

Fate: to affirm what had arrived to each of them by chance. To set off on their adventure. To walk out into the day, through the old cemetry and past the old village green. To the meadows and the Ees. To the river, and Jackson's Boat.

But she wasn't there. Days passed, and she never appeared; her car never pulled up. She never crystallised from the day, arriving from her tasks, her projects. He was at the cafe as he always was. He arrived there. He sat, with others or alone. But Ann?

He phoned her once, in the early days of her absence. She sounded busy. Her hands were full, she said. – 'I'll call you back later'. He said he was at the cafe. She said she might come later if she had time. – 'I've got a lot of things on'. He felt he breached something, some code, by phoning her. That he'd disturbed something, the still surface of their association. He should have been truer to it, that limpid surface. Nothing should be forced: why hadn't he understood that?

The afternoons passed. He walked; he didn't see her. Best of all, he thought, was to bump into Ann by chance. To bump into Ann, blinking and surprised, mid-mission. Midway through one of her missions. She'd tell him what she was doing. Where she was going. What she had bought.

She'd open a bag. Food from the deli: pasta, pesto … or a blind from the hardware shop. Or a box of screws and picture hooks. He'd meet her on route, on the way to something, or coming back from there. Heading back to her car. About to go off, to drive off. To launch away from the kerb like a riverboat … 'Great to see you'.

It would have been more perfect still if she had failed to see him, he says. That she was about to walk pass him, having failed to see him. He would hail her, the poet says. He would call her name: 'Ann!' Ann, exclamation mark. And she would stop, surprised. He would have seen her default face, her everyday face, her face for the streets, her face for her missions (she was always very busy, before her illness, Ann). He would have caught it out, there on the street, the most public space of all.

Or better still, he would have liked her not to recognise him at all, so he had to remind her who he was, the poet says. – 'I'm —-', he would say, 'remember me?' And she would stop and look at him, her eyes narrowing, sizing him up. – 'We used to meet at the cafe', he would say. And she still wouldn't be sure who he was, not really. He finds that idea very moving. He pictures a lake, perfectly still in the twilight. A lake beneath the sky, and holding its image. A lake reflecting nothing, nothing in particular.

Or, still better, he would have to remind her who he was, but she wouldn't remember. She would deny all knowledge of him, even as, somehow, she was sure she him from somewhere. Who was he? Who was he, now, to Ann? No one in particular. Anyone; everyone. And she would go off and meet someone else. Someone she knew, the poet says. And he imagines a planet of water, perfectly still. An ocean planet, orbiting some remote star, turning in stillness.

But he never met her, Ann, on the street. Never saw her driving by in her Saab. And soon, he wouldn't walk those streets himself in the long afternoons.

'Ill, unemployed. Unemployed and ill. The Ees. Walking in the Meadows, the grass flowering … Walking up past Jackson's Boat towards Didsbury. Was this really the Mersey, which flowed into the great estuary on which Liverpool (pretty much) was built?'

What does he remember? What stands out? That time, more than the others, is indistinct for him. As though there was something about it that memory could not cross, not all the way. That, like the birds who set out to fly across the Dead Sea and drop from the sky with exhaustion, there was something not to be reached, that remained there, fuzzy and indistinct, a background that could not become a foreground, and which could only be seen from the corner of your eye.

And even then, it seemed to not to want to be seen. To hide from sight, if only (in my imagination) to turn its eyes on you; to see you before you could see it. – 'It was as though it had already seen me, already known me, that what I sought to remember was the effect of its greater power of memory. As if my whole life, everything I had lived, were but an episode it was recounting to itself. A way it would know itself, discover itself, and perhaps come back to itself, for it was always coming back thus, sending out arcs of lives like the flares that rise and arc across the body of the sun.

'Who was I? Who had I ever been? My life had been an echo of something else. Mine, what was mine, was only a way for something else to possess itself. I felt as though I were being turned inside out like a glove. My memories were not mine; my life was not mine. Everything that belonged to me did so only as a kind of haze produced on the surface of a greater body. I was mist. I was a cloud of midges above the water. No: we were like a mist, Ann and I; we were like a cloud of midges above the water.

*

'Read the quotation on the post-it note there', the poet says. 'No, not that one – above it. Read it out'.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

'Virginia Woolf', he says. 'And it's true not only of memory. Does his life make sense to him only now?', he wonders. 'The opposite, the very opposite', he says. 'It shouldn't make sense. It should be released from sense, or what we think of as sense', the poet says. 'From linearity. From order. There's nothing worse than the story! Nothing more imprisoning!

'Storytellers are like drunks', the poet says. 'The worst kind of drunks, rambling and belligerent, convinced they have something important to say. But there is another kind of drunk who knows nothing is important. The sovereign drunk who will say anything and nothing, who will speak just to let words bob like a beachball on a seal's snout. To make of speech a toy, and of speech pure play. To say words simply because they are words.

'So what story will he tell?', the poet says. 'The same story, over and again', he says. 'The same, which is to say, the non-story, the impossibility of stories. Look at you, with your dictaphone, waiting for stories! Waiting for wisdom. Well he has no stories, no real stories, and no wisdom, not what a Dane would regard as wisdom.

'The Mersey, that was the river. The young Mersey, because it was no more than ten feet wide. It was modest, almost anonymous. You wouldn't have thought to ask its name. It didn't want to be remembered. But the Mersey it was, and there we were, on its banks.

'How many walks did we take, Ann and I? A handful? Just one? Or perhaps they didn't walk at all, perhaps this is a fake memory, cryptomnesia, as they call it'. But it's real enough, this memory, he assures me of that. What were they talking about? Ann was telling an anecdote, the poet says.

'It was the end of a summer's day, Ann said. She and her friend were sitting beneath a tree. A game, even though they were weary. One of them had flash cards, and the other – was it Ann? - was to guess the shapes on those flashcards without seeing them. Wearily receptive, as the light failed, and Ann, the guesser (if it was Ann), guessed right almost every time.

'"That's what you couldn't repeat under test conditions", Ann said. "It's why they can't prove the existence of ESP". Ann was a great believer in ESP, the poet says. – "Really, we know all each other's thoughts", she said. "We know, but we don't want to know". What am I thinking, then?, I asked her, falling happily into the trap. – "About how pretty I am", said Ann, smiling'. How pretty she was! And there it was. She wanted something from him. Something was to begin, but who was he to begin it?

His tendency, he's well aware, is to narrate his life as though he was always acted upon, never acting. – 'As though I never showed any initiative, and what happened did so almost despite me'. So what did happen then, on the banks of the Mersey, just up from Jackson's Boat? What did he do?

'Nothing', he says. 'Or nothing that she might have wanted'. He didn't take her in his arms, as you are supposed to. He didn't turn and kiss her full on the mouth. He didn't let his hand drift out and touch hers, and then clasp hers. They walked along. He was awkward. He'd got in his own way. He was getting in his own way.

Oh to stand aside, completely aside! To let another come forward in his place, living his life, taking it over! He wanted to delegate his life to another. Someone else should be living for him. But there he was, living, or doing something like living. No kisses, then. No taking her in his arms. He was the one being acted upon, not her. He was the one yielding, but to what? Oh God, oh God.

What excuse did he have for his inaction? What alibi? Did he really want to be left alone, unromanced, unromancing? Was he really to sit on the sidelines of life? I'll sit this one out: wasn't that what he'd said, so far, of his life? And he was sitting it out, this one life, this only life he had. But what of it?, he thought to himself defiantly. I stumble over myself; I get in my own way. And so what?, he thought. I am my own obstacle. And why shouldn't he be?, he thought, suddenly fierce.

'Nothing happened, Dane', the poet says. 'Do you see? Do you like my story?' As a Dane, I would have kissed her, he knows that. A big, strapping Dane, all blonde and blue eyed. All poetic! – 'I would have taken her to my arms and held her', he says. 'You Danes are all decision, he says. All decision and straightforwardness!

'It's as though you were a young nation, though he knows Denmark is quite ancient, with its Vikings and so on. As though you were Australian, or something, very young, full of life and confidence and white teeth!' But he was no Australian, he says, and no Dane, do I see? Can I understand?

He was passive, dreadfully passive. Mars was not in his birthchart, he says. He was a Pisces, dreadfully Piscean. Too old to act! Too tired, as though he'd lived a thousand times. Hasn't he felt, sometimes, as though thousands of lives had trailed before him. That his life was one of the last times his soul would be born on earth?

It was so attenuated, his soul. So blanched. It wasn't enlightenment that he had to achieve to escape the wheel of rebirth, but a kind of perfect attenuation. A perfect stretching out of the soul …

Sometimes he wished he was old, really old. That he could have had done with it, all the business of life. In India – old India - you can become an ascetic only after you've lived as a householder. You must have married and had children before you can leave the world behind. But there were exceptional cases in which asceticism was permitted.

Didn't Sankara, for example, forgo marriage, and leave his parents' care as a wandering sanyasin? He would have wandered thus in his imagination, the poet says. He was ready to give the world up before he had grown to know it. And he's ready still, he says. Do I suppose he's ever lived, really lived?, he asks me. Do I think he know what it means to live?

'Illness', the poet says. 'Unemployment. Each hollowed out day was exactly the same. Each day … It was a life in lieu, a life echoing with what it was not. Within what labyrinth was I lost? The great plane of carpeted floors spreading from room to room …

'Peace: my neighbours quiet. How far into their illnesses had they gone? The agoraphobe, who, when it was dark and the sky felt less distant, would take an ancient, half-blind collie to the meadows. The manic-depressive who, when she was 'up', would bring men home from nightclubs and make great mad plans with them about their future lives. – "We're trying for a baby", she said of one, who she had met three days ago. Trying for a baby … Until the new lover disappeared, like all the others. Until the depression came and she sank back under, moving greyly beneath at its surface like a body under ice. We were falling, each of us. But my neighbours were quiet then, the poet says. Not like now. Not with these students …'

His curtains were drawn. No light. He didn't want to see the sunlight through the filthy windows. Didn't want to see the dust motes drifting through the air. Time was vast enough – there was already too much time. Too much light, on top of that …

'You have to surround your living space with darkness. You have to shroud yourself'. He still does that, the poet says. That's why he lives half-underground. And live carefully, meagrely, without venturing into the open waters. So he reads in his armchair, the desklamp by his side. He reads there, at the bottom of the world, in his pit, surrounded by four walls and a curtained window.

He'd learned it then, those skills, those survival skills. The indecency of light, he says. The white light that sees nothing, but that sees. Blindness watches. Blindness sees. And there are no secrets left; nothing hidden. What's your excuse?, asks the open sky, like God. What are you going to do with your life?, that's what it asks.

In those moments, the sky feels very close – vast and wide and close. White light. It's the day itself that interrogates you. Light in your face: the whole sky interrogates you. And what answer can you give? The question turns inside you like a whirlwind. It's hollowing you out; you're an empty vessel. Hollow, hollow like a clay pot.

'We need darkness and silence', the poet says. 'We need to be left alone'. That was the worse thing about his illness, he said. It left you prone. It beached you. Lying down, you could be horribly exposed.

But then, too, sometimes he thought of his illness as being terribly light. Buoyant, even. It wasn't quite his, his illness, that's how it felt. An illness no one suffers, or that no one suffers inside you. As though your innards were filled with light. As though the white sky was there too, where you once had organs. White light like the maggots which writhe below rotten logs.

'It's why people start drinking', the poet says. 'The day drives them mad. The pale, seeming sourceless light of a cloudy day'. Is that what the alcoholics saw, whom he used to pass at the end of his street? They drank under clouds. Drank as soon as the morning lifted itself from the night. With dawn, their first drink. And they drank their way to dusk. – 'The alcoholic lives in the eternal day', the poet says. 'In eternal light'.

For a while, he drank, the poet says, but he had no stomach for it. Sweet, stale beer in abandoned cans on his floor. Stale lager, bought cheaply – an obscure brand from a German supermarket. Others, elsewhere, would be drinking Aldi lager, he thought. Hungarians. Albanians. Old Europeans. They would understand him over there, he thought. They knew about light, bland and shadowless. It was the same white light above their rust belts and zones of radioactivity.

He sipped his cans of sweet beer, curtains drawn, TV turned on with the sound down. White light flowered through him, he imagined. Light passed through his permeable body. Nothing happened, he said. Nothing was happening, least of all his life. Nothing whatsoever: can you imagine that? Can the Dane imagine it?

'Nothing – thickening', the poet says. 'Nothing, as though it had its own substance its own body, seeking itself inside you. Absence become presence, white light like fog drifting through you, light displaced from itself like a ghost. Can you imagine, Dane, wanting nothing at all? Being lost from all orbits?'

Summer returned, the poet says. So it had been a full year! Summer. He opened the small window to let in the air, he says. He saw and pulled back from the hazy sky. He had had enough of the sky. He watched the traffic gather and disperse on the road. He saw the blank faces of the houses, opposite.

Was he recovering? He wondered. He was up – awake. He was at his window, vertical, and looking out of window. Wasn't that a great deal? But I wouldn't understand any of this, the poet says. Danes are vertical people! A striding-about people! You're always striding about, getting things done!, he says, except when it's winter, and you're drinking and becoming maudlin.

Am I a maudlin drinker?, he wonders. I don't look maudlin, it's true, but you can never tell, with a Dane. One minute you're all bonhomie and striding about, the next, slumped into a corner weeping into your schnapps … The Dane is never really a horizontal person, a defeated person, the poet says. He's vertical – and then he's non-vertical, slumped, and that's all. The maudlin is only a modality of purposiveness, of striding about, in the Dane, the poet says.

But he was telling me a story, the poet says. He was trying to improve me. Where was he? Ah yes, his recovery. How can he convey it to me? What it meant. What he left behind. He shouldn't try, he says. He should give up now.

I'm going inside, he'd said to himself last summer, the poet says. I'm never coming out. He was going in, he had decided, and it was the world that had to come inside to see him. He was to be inside, and the world outside; it knew where to find him. He was brought meals on trays with tin foil covering them. A cleaner came to vacuum his rooms and wipe the surfaces.

Sometimes, it was true, he went out. Some evenings, with the darkness around him and his fleece zipped up, he would take a few steps down the road. Aldi wasn't far, and it was open until late. Once or twice, he'd knocked on the door of the manic-depressive. Once or twice, the agoraphobic. No reply, just as he'd never reply when there was a knock on his door.

The cleaner had her own key. The meals people, who unlocked his door to leave a warm tray on the dining table and then took the remnants away the next day. They were disturbance enough. He would hide in his bedroom when they came. He wasn't ready for company, for small talk.

His life was simple, he said. He wanted it simple. Sometimes you have to simplify life, he says, to strip it down to a bare frame. That was Ann was doing, on her side of the city, he was sure of it. And Claire. What Zen-like simplicity had they attained? He couldn't find out, he says. Ann's answering machine had been switched off. He couldn't get through.

He pictured her silence as a great wall, he said. What did it mean? What was its significance? Would he ever find out? Ann was further along than him, he knew that. She'd gone further. Did she, too, feel signs of recovery? Was the illness departing from her, too? Or did condition, all along, run deeper? Did it ask for more from her than him?

He tried her phone again. No, no one there. No: she might be there, but he'd never know. There behind her wall. He thought of crossing town to see her. Thought of catching first one bus, then another, and riding all the way. Couldn't he cross town and knock on her door? Couldn't he, if she didn't answer, throw a handful of gravel up at her window? Perhaps she, too, was vertical. Perhaps she was awake enough to look out from the half-darkness of her house.

He would knock and wait. Throw pebbles and wait. But perhaps no face would appear at the window. And perhaps the door would remain shut, a blank wall. Where was his friend of the four o'clocks? Where his friend of the afternoons, of the old afternoons? Wasn't it at the cafe table they met every afternoon, to celebrate their partial crossing of the day? Wasn't it there, a full hour before the shift changed and the cafe prepared to become an evening restaurant, that they could share a pot of tea?

'We're made of our absences, of our lacks', the poet says. 'We're made of what we crave'. Do you know as it happens that a particular event – a meeting, a phonecall – is the last of its kind? He didn't, he says. In fact, he could hardly pick them out, those last points of contact, those last encounters. Nothing had really finished. Nothing had really rounded itself into a story.

We want always want stories, the poet says. He's sure I want a story, that's what I'm after, isn't it, waving my dictaphone about? And he would have liked a story too, back then. Would have liked something to have ended or to have carried on beginning. The latter, of course, was what he really wanted; but the former, too, would have done.

We like stories, the poet says. We like things to make sense. And when they don't? When the story becomes a non-story? That's been his life, the poet says, leaning forward. It is that to which he's tried to be loyal, if he's been loyal to anything. Nothing really happened, he said. Nothing began, do I understand that? No, of course I don't. It's the last thing a Dane could understand, he says.

'Months and then years, falling into illness. How far could we fall, the ill? Always further, even as the city regenerated around us. We were the dregs, the last ones, sick from unemployment, unemployed because we were sick, and switching from sickness benefit to unemployment benefit and back again …

'The walls of the room. The bed, the television, the sofa: this was my world. Days and nights passed in my flat, alone in my flat. Is this what I wanted? To draw a shelter over my head and hide in the half-light?

'I thought of Ann. We're all ill, she had said. Everyone's ill, if only they realised it. She had thought of herself as a kind of pioneer, as an antennae, quivering sensitively ahead of the race. Ann was ready to be seriously ill. She was ready to see it through to the end.

'She'd worked hard – too hard, she'd said. She'd built up her business, she and her business partner. She'd bought her houses. But the illness came, and she had to wait for illness to pass through her and away. Had to lie down and wait, to welcome illness in her own way, and to affirm it as it passed. Only then would she be able to rise, one day, and be ready for the world.

'She has all the time in the world. Time – for what? For falling ill, she said. Really ill. And now it was to be my time, too. I was lucky I met her. Lucky she referred me to her GP. Lucky that I had been referred, in turn, to the specialist. And now? She had fallen away from me. She lay on her own bed in the other side of the city, as I lay in mine. She lay in her own half-darkness, her sheltered accommodation protecting her from the world, and I lay in mine'.

He used to leave messages on her answering machine, knowing she'd be there. She'd promised to listen to them. She'd understand, she said. She was a little further on than him. He was a little behind, catching up. She would listen to him, she said.

'So I'd phone her, and hear her pre-sickness voice on the line. Please leave a message after the beep. I left my messages. Ann, I'm just calling to say … or, Hi Ann, it's me, I hope you're feeling better …

'I remembered Ann's friend Claire, who seemed sicker than both of us, even farther on. Did Ann leave messages on Claire's answering machine? Hi Claire, it's me, Ann. I'm just ringing to say … or, Claire, it's Ann. How are you?

'And to whom did Claire turn?, I thought. Who was more ill than she was? And who did she ring, Claire's friend? Someone, beyond us all, was the Most Ill, I thought. Someone, in some distant suburb, was further on than any of us …

'And meanwhile, illness. And in the meantime, illness. That filled my day. No: it drew my day away from me. There was no more time. No forward movement. Week after week fell into obscurity. Week after hollowed-out week. I'm so bored, I said to Ann's answering machine. Do you think it's possible to die of boredom, I said, really die?

'Sometimes, as the days grew longer, I would remember how Ann and I first met. I remembered in the cafe, unknown to me, talking to this person or that. I remembered her in the cafe garden, taking the sun, or coming in to shelter from the rain, the dreadful Manchester rain', the poet says. 'I remembered her car, her grey Saab, with the power tools in the back.

'Who introduced us, Ann and I? Who told one of us about the other?' He can't remember. Either way, they ended up talking, over a pot of tea. They talked, and it was as though they had always known one another. That's when she said it. She was ill, she told him. He was unemployed, he said. – "You're ill, too", she said. – "And you're also unemployed", he said, although that wasn't really true, she told him later.

She'd become a silent partner in her business. She was sent cheques every month … And she got sickness benefit, too, she said. But she hadn't been feeling well. She couldn't work, not really. Perhaps it was time to sell one of her houses, she said. What did I think? 

'She should sell it, I had said. She should free herself from everything. From everything that might distract her. If you're going to be ill, then be really ill, I told her. I told her what Robert Walser, the author, said when he entered the mental hospital. "I'm not here to write, but to be mad". So he stopped writing. As she, Ann, should stop working. That was what she wanted to hear. That's when she told him about her friend Claire, who had the same condition. She was much further on than her, Ann had said. And we drove over to see her in Ann's grey Saab …'

So one day, in late spring, he phoned her, full of memories. Hi, it's me again, he was going to say. I wanted to know how Claire was. Are you guys still in touch? Or, Hi, Ann, hope you're okay. I was thinking of the cafe the other day – do you remember? And Claire. How is she? But he didn't hear the recorded message on her answering machine. There was no one to take his call.

Was the machine full? He wondered. Hadn't she bothered to empty the machine at all? Or perhaps she'd unplugged the machine. Perhaps she'd had enough of his phonecalls, his messages. Or perhaps she'd moved on, left. Perhaps she was better, and walking out in the spring sunshine … Perhaps she fixing things in her houses with her power tools. Perhaps she was showing round new tenants …

He imagined her opening her front door and standing there, narrow-eyed in the light. He imagined her going out to the car, brushing away the leaves on the bonnet, opening the door, driving away from the kerb, power tools in the boot …

What might have happened between him and Ann?, the poet says. What romance? There are romances that never really begin, the poet says, or that teeter on the edge of beginning, reluctant to step over, as though they carried with them something that would not begin, that would continue to hold them back.

Illness drew them together; illness separated them. Illness was what they had in common; illness held them far apart. Nothing began, nothing was to begin. Ann had retreated. He had.

Now, when he thought of her, it was as something impersonal. A row of arches spanning up into the clouds. The dry bank of a stream. Hadn't he thought he saw her in the swifts feeding their juveniles on the wing, or the grey wagtails on the riverpath?

Once, Ann and he and walked out along the river, quite far, almost all the way to the Botanical Gardens. They'd walked out, talking of nothing in particular, talking of everything, talking of nothing, as the summer filled each topic they touched upon with a kind of lightness, loosening them up into the air like fire balloons.

It felt like a beginning, but in fact it was an end. How many days had he spent like that, thinking he was at the brink of something, that it was a matter of stepping forward? – 'No matter', the poet says. 'No regrets.

'We are made of our defeats', he says. 'From our failures'. Look at him, he says. Do I see a failure? Of course I do, he said. – 'We're stranded in this life', he says. 'Someone left us here. Someone forgot us.

'And what of you, Dane? Who forgot you? Are you going to be like Kurtz, disappearing among the tribes he was supposed to conquer? Are you going to give up your Danish life and disappear into Manchester?' He laughs. 'A Dane in Manchester, a Dane in Manchester …' He finds this very funny.