After Me Comes the Flood

And there are days I forget myself, because my eyes are the only ones that don't see me - I look out and see beauty and think I take part in it then remember I am so different I might as well be a dog in the street, and I have never been desired, and it is beyond me to imagine it...and I'll never tell him, even though I don't want anything in return, because what's really cruel is that no-one for a moment would believe that a woman like me could fall in love like everybody else.

The rock under my feet turned out to be sand after all, and in the end the tide came in. Walker says I'm free, like a dog off it's leash. Which is all very well, but what if I run into the road?

Behind me Eve went on playing [the piano], breaking off sometimes to sweat quietly but viciously, and play a dozen times the phrase she’d mistaken, until the memory of it must have lodged in the bones and tendons of her hands.

They say that’s how the Greeks got their alphabet,’ said Walker. ‘Cranes flew over and made all the letters with their wings and legs. When the last crane in England was shot, it was the end of the great poets.

Since then I've wondered what could have suddenly made me incautious and unwise. Maybe it was the fault of the music, because it had been honest and true and meant only for me, and it made me think: Maybe I matter after all.

I've felt nothing, done nothing, seen nothing - I'm a long pause, am empty bar: I make no noise at all...