In the Skin of a Lion

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light

Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.

The rain comes through their thin cotton clothes against their muscles. Alice sweeps back her wet hair. A sudden flinging of sheet lighting and Clara sees Alice subliminal in movement almost rising up into the air, shirt removed, so her body can meet the rain, the rest of her ascent lost to darkness till the next brief flutter of light when they hold a birch tree in their clasped hands, lean back and swing within the rain. They crawl delirious together in the blackness. There is no moon. There is the moon flower in its small power of accuracy, like a compass, pointing to where the moon is, so they can bay towards its absence.

There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.

Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.

He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.

Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.