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must I?’
    ‘You’re not married but you won’t sleep with me.’
    ‘You are married.’
    ‘That’s my problem.’
    ‘True …’
    ‘Well then …’
    ‘I’ve done it before and it became my problem.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘I fell in love.’
    It was a long time ago. It feels like another life until I remember it was my life, like a letter you turn up in your own handwriting, hardly believing what it says.
    I loved a woman who was married. She loved me too, and if there had been less love or less marriage I might have escaped. Perhaps no one really does escape.
    She wanted me because I was a pool where she drank. I wanted her because she was a lover anda mother all mixed up into one. I wanted her because she was as beautiful as a warm afternoon with the sun on the rocks.
    The damage done was colossal.
    ‘You lost her?’
    ‘Of course I did.’
    ‘Have you got over it?’
    ‘It was a love affair not an assault course.’
    ‘Love is an assault course.’
    ‘Some wounds never heal.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    She held out her hand. What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the
Titanic
you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.

    She held out her hand. ‘You’re still angry.’
    ‘I’m still alive.’
    What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
    ‘But pain is pointless.’
    ‘Not always.’
    ‘Then what is the use of suffering? Can you tell me that?’
    She thinks I’m holding on to pain. She thinks the pain is a souvenir. Perhaps she thinks that pain is the only way I can feel. As it is, the pain reminds me that my feelings are damaged. The pain doesn’t stop me loving—only a false healing could do that—the pain tells me that neither my receptors nor my transmitters are in perfect working order. The pain is not feeling, but it has become an instrument of feeling.

    She said, ‘Do you still like having sex?’
    ‘You talk as though I’ve had an amputation.’
    ‘I think you have. I think someone has cut out your heart.’
    I looked at her and my eyes were clear.
    ‘That’s not how the story ends.’
    Stop.
    There is always the danger of automatic writing. The danger of writing yourself towards an ending that need never be told. At a certain point the story gathers momentum. It convinces itself, and does its best to convince you, that the end in sight is the only possible outcome. There is a fatefulness and a loss of control that are somehow comforting. This was your script, but now it writes itself.
    Stop.
    Break the narrative. Refuse all the stories that have been told so far (because that is what the momentum really is), and try to tell the storydifferently—in a different style, with different weights—and allow some air to those elements choked with centuries of use, and give some substance to the floating world.
    In quantum reality there are millions of possible worlds, unactualised, potential, perhaps bearing in on us, but only reachable by worm-holes we can never find. If we do find one, we don’t come back.
    In those other worlds events may track our own, but the ending will be different. Sometimes we need a different ending.
    I can’t take my body through space and time, but I can send my mind, and use the stories, written and unwritten, to tumble me out in a place not yet existing—my future.
    The stories are maps. Maps of journeys that have been made and might have been made. A Marco Polo route through