Someone is running down the beach in a striped bikini. Nearby another person is choking on salt water and sand in the breakers.

A man walks down the road which is a muddy chestnut colour and there are trees on either side. Gum trees, and poplars which are turning different colours because it’s autumn. It has just rained.

A woman is sitting in a car on the side of the road, behind the reflections of the car windows. She sits still and walking by can be seen from behind, in profile and full face,

She is thinking.

About a girl standing in a courtyard with an old woman screaming at her, You are filthy, you’re a whore. And people looking down from windows in the block of flats. The story a friend wrote about taking off the wall of a block of flats and looking in. And Sorin, sitting in a coffee lounge, pointing across the street above the shops. Imagine what you would see, if you took the wall off. People knifing each other, fucking, shooting up, blowing their noses, eating.

Of nights driving along in a car, counting the telegraph poles, watching the inside of the car and seeing the lights from outside lighting up the inside (someone’s red fingernails / regularly).

Going off alone, leaving other people’s company, alone.

The woman is waiting in the car. She looks across the countryside. The only house is a picturesque white cottage with a red roof surrounded by pine trees and huge camellia bushes.

The man is a speck on the road. She Iooks at his back and wonders if she should run after him and say, It’s okay after all, let’s forget about everything. But he gets in his car and she sits down in the gutter hoping he’ll read her thoughts, but he drives off in the other direction without looking back.

She walks across the courtyard in deep shadow in the late afternoon. The sound of a piano being played. She lies in bed under the bay window looking up through the curtains at the block of flats.

The beach and she has to leave. Curled up behind a rock out of the wind. Sitting in the car with children knocking at the windows pulling faces.

Standing in the courtyard looking from the landlady to the people staring down from the block of flats, to the steep stairway and the wooden gate at the street

The man is drawing closer. He is walking slowly, reading a folded-up newspaper which he turns over.

A dog runs along the beach with a stick and drops it and keeps on running.

At the top of the stairway, the garage is on fire. He tried to run in through the door and his hair is singed. What is the right thing to do? Look around the party. Jeff, I don’t believe you’re going away. Are you really?

The dog drops the stick on the lino and jumps into the visitor’s lap.

Not being able to see the end or the beginning. Days pass over us.

Asleep in the afternoon in the bay window, the sun is streaming through the curtains and wakes them up. She lies on the ball of his smooth yellow shoulder looking at his face, his thin lips1 as he speaks, His slit-like eyes, his yellow hair. Let’s get married and go to London.

They are asleep in the bed and she wakes to see a thin man like a black pixie appear slyly

round the door, throw metho on the end of the bed and a match. Vhoomp! The bed is in flames and she is up and out the door. She rushes out to his friends, Quick, save him and here’s some money for food. She gets to work, pulling the ghostly white covers off the furniture.

The dog’s face appears at the car window, excited, like a crazy thing. She sees the whites of its eyes and its tongue flapping on the window, its claws scratching at the door. It races off down the road, recedes and is a bouncing point, then back again growing larger and larger, ignoring her as it flashes past. Then the man draws level with the car and calls the dog to heel.