…”There’s plenty of  ‘How did you contrive to grasp

The thread which led you through this labyrinth?

How build such solid fabric out of air?

How on so slight foundation found this tale,

Biography, narrative?’ or, in other words,

‘How many lies did it require to make

The portly truth you here present us with?’

(Final lines in Robert Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge, “the Medium”‘)

***

In May of the year nineteen ninety-one, the previous owner of this copy of A.S. Byatt’s Possession A Romance penned in her name on the first page – one Susan Wanless from Canterbury. The book has now travelled over to me.

My own story writing proceeds at a slow pace. For writing fiction doesn’t only require following the right thread. It requires making the thread too. The one that will provide the most compelling reason for seemingly haphazard events bringing together unrelated people to some significant, life-changing realization.

While also retrieving two wet and happy dogs after their neighborhood romp through the rain. Writing down childhood memories as they crop up with the aid of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And preparing to sit down with a seventeen year-old boy and the writing he’s developed since trekking from Guinea to Libya, then tossing across the briny sea, surviving a storm that had nothing imaginary about it and landing in a group home in this small town with his need to put the right words to his experiences. The other boys in similar straights – but without his word skills – call him The President.

***

24.7.16

Zounds. The last words on page 88 of Byatt’s Possession A Romance, read :

I shall forget nothing of what has passed. I have not a forgetting nature. (Forgiving is no longer the question, between us, is it ?) You may rest assured

 My eyes switch over to the page on the right and I read :

And vigour. How shall I characterize it ? It is like a huge, intricately embroidered tapestry in a shadowed stone hall

I look down at the page number : 121. What occurs between pages 89 and 120, I’ll never know.

Zounds and hounds of the Baskervilles.