Love

One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.

Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?

They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and had failed…

I’ve changed a lot since 1969, and so has the world; I’m more benign, the world is far bleaker, and the people in Love would now be edging nervously up to the middle age they thought could never happen, they thought the world would end first.

She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.

She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me.” Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him.

Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality.

The function of the fool in the Elizabethan drama, a reference point outside events but inside another kind of logic, the remorseless logic of unreason where all vision is deranged, all action uncoordinated and all responses beyond prediction.

By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good.

Buzz crouched between her feet and scrutinised as much as he could see of her perilous interior to find out if all was in order and there were no concealed fangs or guillotines inside her to ruin him.

They rolled all over the pastel crayons scattered on the sheets so her back was variegated with patches and blotches all the colours of the rainbow and Lee was also marked everywhere with brilliant dusts, both here and there also darkly spotted with blood, each a canvas involuntarily patterned by those workings of random chance so much prized by the surrealists.