Margaret Leigh

‘Tomorrow I’ll show you what I know, and we will try to fit the two together. Then you can decide how you wish to act hereafter. Tomorrow,’ he says. ‘Can you wait a bit longer?’ Hereafter, I think. A backwards-looking word for time that is still to come. In itself a blasphony. Before Chimes, a voice says in my head, there would have been a time for

‘Do you know what steals your memories?’ I look at him. Because it is a strange question, one that has no answer and many answers. The river of sleep takes memories down into the murk and silt. Night and the darkness take them. Waking takes them, or our own sadness. Or maybe it’s that forgetting is like a spore or blight inside each memory itself,

The lines of wire, someone said, I don’t remember who, used to be how sound travelled. I don’t understand this, as they are not tight stretched like cello or viol strings, but slack and covered in stickwrap. After a while we’re coming near to where Lucien sang the Lady’s cadence. I start to listen for her as we run, wait for the telltale drops of s

Oddments in thamesmud, these memories. Unlinked and unmeaning. And then I put them together in a line.

‘It’s Giovanni,’ she said. I watched her. ‘Isn’t it,’ she asked, carefully, ‘that you think you’ve done something awful to him by leaving him in that room? I think you blame yourself for what happened to him. But, darling, nothing you could have done would have helped him. Stop torturing yourself.’ ‘He was so beautiful,’ I said. I had not meant to

The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

‘People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity… Straight cats invent faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves.’

Hella and I went to a lot of movies, and found ourselves, very often, sitting in empty, fifth-rate bars. We walked a lot, in silence. We no longer seemed to see things to point out to each other. We drank too much, especially me.

‘I wish, any way,’ I said at last, ‘that you’d believe me when I say that, if I was lying, I wasn’t lying to you.’ She turned toward me with a terrible face. ‘I was the one you were talking to. I was the one you wanted to come with you, to this terrible house in the middle of nowhere. I was the one you said you wanted to marry.’ ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘