The House of Doors

That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.

I feel that when I travel I can change myself a little, and I return from a journey not quite the same self I was.

I lay in bed for a while, listening to the drowsy waves as the light outside changed, the ink of night diluting to dawn.

All of us will be forgotten eventually. Like a wave on the ocean, leaving no trace that it had once existed.

All at once we were swimming in cobalt fire, every kick and stroke igniting the tempests of plankton swirling around us. I laughed, the sound rupturing the quiet, windless night, and then Willie joined me as well. We dunked our heads under the blazing sea and came up again, spluttering fire from our lips. Rivulets of blue flames streamed down Willie’s hair, his face. I touched my own cheek, felt it glowing; I scooped up handfuls of the sea, marvelling at the fire-snakes writhing down my arms. We grinned at each other with stupid, childlike glee. Our naked bodies were visible in the water, but what was there to be embarrassed about? We were nothing more than two insects preserved in amber, after all. Whenever the fire dimmed, we would scissor our legs and swing our arms, stoking the watery furnace. ‘If we flapped our limbs hard and fast and long enough,’ I said to Willie, ‘do you think we could light up the entire ocean?

Every night, after Robert had retired to his bedroom, I would lie on the patch of kweek grass in the garden, searching the night sky with my field glasses, a thrill bolting through me whenever I saw a dislodged star streaking across the heavens. I learned their names and their shapes: the Southern Cross; Auriga; Coma Berenices; Horologium; Orion; Circinus; Apus; Andromeda. I soon knew them all, these constellations in the night sky, constellations that had, since the beginning of the world, been sinking into the earth each morning, to rise again the next night.

dipping sauce that he had concocted himself, a blend of soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, some cinnamon and cloves and star anise, and finely chopped red chillies.

Why risk drawing the beam of that particular light onto yourself?

The Taipings, I was happy to find out, viewed women as the equal of men. From the earliest days of the rebellion their women had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with the men against the emperor’s troops.

They forced all Chinese men to tie their hair in a queue,’ Sun Wen said, ‘the symbol of my people’s enslavement to the Manchus.

Willie’s words had polished the lens through which I had always viewed my husband, and yet, at the same time, they shifted him slightly out of focus.

Money's the sixth sense. If you don't have it, you can't make … the most of the other five.

You know what … money really is? Money’s the sixth sense. If you don’t have it, you can’t make … the most of the other five.

He wondered what had mesmerised her down there in the deep last night. Fearing the worst when she did not resurface, he had dived in after her and had found her far below, enclosed in a bulb of dimming, wavering light, a lantern adrift in the currents of the sea.

that remains of a woman’s life, a woman’s story–a few fading lines of missing words,’ said Lesley, running her palm over the edge of the headstone. ‘A cemetery isn’t where the dead are remembered, but a place where they are to be forgotten.

The photograph in my room – it’s the one my mother had taken that morning. She wanted me to remember what she looked like. She was afraid of being forgotten.

My eyes follow the two birds as they drift on the span out their out-stretched wings, writing circles over circles on the empty pages of sky.

The Manchus stormed down from the northern plains three hundred years ago, breached the Great Wall and vanquished the Ming emperor,