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brown paper parcel. ‘He was very insistent you should have this.’
    Oliver sat on the beach below the small cliff and took his shoes and socks off. He looked at his watch – he’d better stay here for a couple of hours at least, to allow Lucien time to leave. It was annoying that the painter had been obliged to go to Paris – he had been looking forward to the visit, it would have solved the problem of the day.
    Oliver allowed himself an audible sigh and looked about him, idly. A stout, dark girl in a yellow bikini sunbathed some feet away, her small Yorkshire terrier at her side huddling under a bunched towel for shade. Further along a group of kids sat in a circle arounda transistor radio. Toddlers studiously dug in the wet sand at the gentle surf’s edge. Oliver thought about his birthday – what could he get for ten pounds?… Maybe Dad will call this evening. He’s bound to give me ten pounds too, maybe more… He mentally totalled all the potential fiscal gifts that he might receive from his assorted relatives and came up with a satisfyingly large figure. Not such a bad birthday after all, he thought, and unwrapped the painter’s present.
    It was the wet fields painting, Oliver was not too surprised to discover – and just what was he supposed to do with it, he wondered? It wasn’t particularly well painted, Oliver thought, and also the painter himself had seemed dissatisfied with it. He felt a slight surge of irritation that the painter had given him a picture that even he had been unable to finish properly. What it needed was something else in it, not just fields and sky. Maybe, Oliver thought, he should paint his bike in one of the corners, have it leaning over on its stand…
    The sunbathing girl in the bikini turned over suddenly and rolled on to her small dog, which gave an anguished yelp of pain and surprise. No, Oliver thought, inspired, if he painted the sky blue then the field would look like a beach. Then he could paint the girl lying on the beach with her yellow bikini and her little dog. And then the painting would at least be finished – at least it would be about something. Oliver stared at the plump girl as she fussed and petted her discomfited dog. He found himself grinning, felt the laugh brim in his throat, and quickly covered his mouth with his hand in case she should see.

Notebook No. 9
    [It had become his habit over the years, whenever he lunched alone, to take a small notebook with him, into which he jotted down his random thoughts and observations, preferring to disguise his solitariness by writing, rather than reading.]
    No crab-cakes today, so I settled with bad grace for a pseudo-
salade niçoise
(no potatoes). This restaurant is renowned for its crab-cakes – this is why I and most of its clientèle come here – so why not supply crab-cakes on a daily basis? Just seen
Slang
– interesting thriller, because it all takes place during the course of one night. A clear
hommage
– which is to say rip-off – to Raupp’s
Death Valley
but without its textures, its love of character. Defects: sudden shifts of mood from whimsy to hardboiled; silly plot contrivances (the lap-dancing scenes, the language school);
fantastic
coincidences – always a sign of waning inspiration. Raupp does this but it sort of works with him. Finally the film is just not
true
– and as Pierre-Henri Duprez, I think, once said somewhere, you can’t hide anything from an audience. (Which is wrong, actually: look at the garbage in our cinemas that is avidly, unreflectingly, credulously consumed.)
    I think Tanja would hate
Slang
. Positively loathe it.
    I spotted bad looping, boom-mike shadow and a clumsily inserted repeat shot. I guess all directors have this tic – we can never be simple
cinéphiles
.
    The lead girl, Michaela Wall, is beguiling (a blonder, rangier Tanja). Ultimately, any genre film is only as good as its characterization.
    There is a woman sitting opposite me who smoked a cigarette in about