I did not count on seeing blood, real blood. I would see Christ, yes; Christ wounded and suffering and bleeding on the cross, and my own blood would be shaken from my heart, like Dante’s blood was once shaken from his, and I would swoon as Lucy Honeychurch had swooned.

I picked up several of her books, four novels and Under a Glass Bell – a collection of short stories – in a Paris bookshop during springtime a few years ago because somewhere or other around that time I’d come across a quote of hers that had really made me feel better: ‘We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension,

She no longer leapt in gleaming Blakean splendour, but was snared in the scored lines of a grim grisaille from a Marxist pamphlet that gravely expounds the dire consequences of having no stake at all in the means of production. For wasn’t it perfectly clear that the merging of the girl’s fingers with the tools she day in day out worked with showed

Their principal interest, right up until the very last bell, was to disrupt the flow of information and ideas, which the teachers attempted each lesson to set in motion, with all kinds of never-ending pranks.

She was tired of being fobbed off, she was restless, hungry – something had to happen, away from this desk, outside of this classroom.

We were lost at sea. The room was just a lot of cold furniture and stagnant reflections, it was difficult to imagine anything. I didn’t feel like staying long.

To dispel any ideas he had of me as being good through and through very probably. To show him there was a lot more to me despite how small I might appear. That I was studious and diligent, yes, but that didn’t prevent me from having wild and boundless thoughts.

Afterwards I finished my beer and had a cigarette and showed Dale my books wanting things to be normal wanting very much for the day that had been and the general feeling of hope it had given rise to to return for the silver skirt to still be shimmering the books in my bag to still be vital and enticing.

She occasionally wondered if her lack of interest in the things around her wasn’t in some way due to her inability to accurately depict them, or perhaps it was the other way around – her inability to accurately depict the things around her was due to her lack of interest in them. But she was interested in them, she was extremely interested in