2nd hour

I'll be your writer for this evening.

You walk into the hotel, that shines drearily in the seaside fog. You reach into that purse you always seem to carry everywhere, the one that makes you look like a footballer's wife or worse. You don't have a husband, just some barely-there lover who sits at your side and if he snores after sex it doesn't matter, he is good to you.

You wear long gloves, like an actress in the thirties, but we both know what they hide. You once left notches on your arm - he loves me, he loves me not. You affect simplicity, but it just reveals the process beneath, like a child showing off a bad magic trick. You never left your village, really: you just brought it with you.

Where will we take you, then? Up to the third floor, a room that must be familiar to you. You put the room key on the bedside cabinet and wait. Then you get nervous, so you rise from the bed and go into the bathroom to prepare. At this point you're thinking, this is going to be some degraded story where he writes about me having sex, and you feel pity.

What if I did? The one part I have of you that you can never take back is the memory of your body. I couldn't photograph your mind, couldn't encase it in a moment, but I remember the curve of your neck when I stood behind you, the touch of your hand on my knee. I wouldn't debase such memories by writing about your body: it's your mind I'm after.

I wrote our relationship from the start, and I'm not going to stop just because you left me. I rehearsed scenes in flying train carriages, jotted witty comments on sick bags in aeroplanes, and scripted whole romances from my work desk on grey ugly mornings. If we eventually saw through each other, then all I can say is such things happen, and we may return to this story.

You turn on the light in the bathroom, but it's still too dark to really see yourself in the mirror. Your whole body is a battleground between youth and age, and the scars caused by one meet the scars caused by the other. Beauty is an impostor come to mock at you: yes, a forgery, the ultimate trompe d'oeil, inserted by nature to entrance us.

Yet as you struggle with your make-up bag, you are more convinced of your body's beauty than its reality. Even if beauty were a dream, it would still be worth dying for. You rotate your head in phases, trying to find your most pleasing aspect in the darkened glass, and yet you are worried that there is a twin vision that shows you in all your ugliness. Which angle would reveal more of your soul?

OK: so he knocks, and you go over to let him in. He isn't a lover, but a teacher come to guide you through the basics. This is what I know of you, and how I choose to show you the little truths you have been trying to hide for so many dinner parties: that you are ignorant, my dear, and desperate to conceal it. He starts you on the fucking alphabet. No, I exaggerate.

His manner is awkward, and he struggles to find the authority necessary in a tutor, because he is embarrassed by the situation. But Christ, look at you, and all the artists you dated, the writers like me, the references you laughed at and the books you said you enjoyed. If there's one thing I hate worse than anything else, it's a hypocrite, a liar, a dilettante, like you.

You worked in art-charities, for christ's sake, taking money away from other causes to give to all that is irrelevant, particularly to someone who barely looked at a painting. And of course it paid for expensive lunches, and the hotel room you sit in now. Your sin stinks, like a dog in a kennel that was never born but crept from its mother's rotting womb. This is a song of hatred, a song for you, my dear.

(30 minutes)

I've got no fucking talent. Rubbish bullshit non-story just like all the others. Well, carry on.

I think it's fabulous that you're a good man, in a place like this. Really, it's so ... authentic. There gathered in his mind a sense of oblivion. Moments later, birds covered almost every part of him. She wanted him to die in a gentle, beautiful way. Some sun had sprinkled into the sunken garden, and the red brick lit up in a glow so strong it made the wall and furniture seem as one.

Her fingers worked at the button until it had fallen off. He twisted the garment until it was thin and unrecognisable. He pressed his child's hand against the keyboard and it made this word: dfh

Someone has to come sooner or later. He rocked further and further until he fell out of the tree, still laughing. It's a dire mess of a party, and no-one's brought their own drink. What she really wanted was such stillness and closeness that she could be entirely enveloped in cloth without being smothered. The baron approaches.

Listen to us, now. You tried it your way and you failed. It's a different world.

The lightning-charred tree stands wonderfully erect, yet an ominous example set by the Gods.
Her beauty was ignited by the presence of her child, and made whole with its happy laughter.
Her gaze was like solidifying ice, her liquid eyes freezing over in anger.
Nothing for me, I'm sick with music and love.
I fragmented out as she embraced me, fracturing into still quiet pieces.
The soulfulness that stirs me was absent in him, almost to the point of blasphemy.
She came softly on the sultry breeze.
A corner of his mind was clouded with the obscure conviction that men hated him out of jealousy.
The occult was a map of the soul for him, a cornerstone of mental illnesses for her.
Well into his sixties he was still bothered by the phrase, "cut his teeth", to the point of nervous irritation.
Some mistakes, he made on his own, others with acquaintances, and still others were made before he was born: and it was these that dogged his life.
Nice of you to visit, she said, flicking a crumb absently along the expanse of settee between them.
He remained strong for the length of time he was sure others were watching, and then cried like a child for the remainder of the day.

1114 words.