Note: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were the famous Moors Murderers, who together killed five children in Greater Manchester, England in the mid-1960s.  Ronnie Biggs was a member of the gang that perpetrated the Great Train Robbery of 1963 – many of the robbers later became celebrities.  Billie Frechette, real name Evelyn, was the lover of the famous 1930s gangster, John Dillinger.

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            They would say afterwards that you were the instigator of it all, that I was the peripheral, the incidental, the blind follower; a lackey, I think they thought I was, although, to be fair, I did have that look about me, I did have the eyes of an abused and perennially morose child.  I suppose I was lucky in that, otherwise the press may have dubbed me the Myra Hindley of the twenty-first century, God knows I may have deserved it, much more than you ever would have; although, between you and me, I always thought that Hindley was a lot less sinister than most people believed.

            I say that, of course, because I felt the same way about a man as she did.

            Although one can never guess to what extent she truly fell for her lover, Brady.

            He was the evil one.  You can tell that easily.  You can tell because he has that way about him, that way of slinking into the shadows, of playing on the fringes of the public consciousness like a half-forgotten nightmare; sometimes you might never know he was there, until you’re reminded of his existence, but we never see pictures of him, oh no.  Maybe it’s because we believe that if he doesn’t rear his ugly head again then he isn’t really there.  He’s nothing more than an incubus, a monster from a childhood fairytale, a bogeyman, we can safely stow him away in the back of our collective memory and make-believe he is consigned to the recycle bin of communal hate. That is the essence of the truly wicked, or so I believe, since I don’t know much about what passes for evil anymore, or what does not – it’s a topsy-turvy world.  It is one’s ability to lurk unheeded on the outskirts of normal everyday life – to watch the world go by on a street corner in broad daylight and to never be noticed.  To make such an impression on others that they forget you: you meld in with the rest of the crowd, you do the perfunctory thing, you mingle, you shake hands, you disappear. 

            Myra, on the other hand, never had that quality, that magician’s gift for the disappearing act.  She made a spectacle of herself, she drew attention, people would point fingers at her, she was an easy target.  She protested too much, and the more she protested, the more convinced the people became that she should remain locked up, she wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t go away, and they hated her all the more for it.  Brady though, he was the smart one.  He kept a low profile.  He never objected.  He accepted, he never once made a fuss.  Not much, anyhow.  Not compared to the way she did.  And because he never gained much attention, well, it was easier to hate him less, he no longer fed our voracious appetite for the lewd and the macabre the way he used to.

            I used to do that a lot – watch people, I mean.  There was a time that I was convinced I was blessed with some sort of seventh sense – I say seventh sense, because no one ever really gave a name to it before, and it most certainly wasn’t a sixth sense.  I used to walk down Tottenham Court Road on the way to University every morning, and everyone used to be locked into their own little world of eat, sleep, shit, sex, catch the train, get to work on time and what have you.  I could see it in their faces.  So much constant thinking we do as humans, yet our expressions remain impassive, vapid, it’s like there’s nothing in there at all.  My seventh sense was this: that I was utterly, utterly preoccupied with the thoughts of others.  While everyone else walked the streets and pondered on their own private little worlds, I’d be looking at them, and wondering whether, if I looked inside their brains for even one moment, I’d be able to tell who they were, where they came from and where they were going.  Everyone, absolutely everyone, seemed so oblivious to the fact that they did, in fact, exist.  Existence was measured in degrees of routine.  And I, I craved something more.  I craved the knowledge of ‘other’.  The world was teeming with chaotic, ordered, dull, insipid, unthinking, ant-like life.  I wanted to be able to switch on that button inside everyone’s heads, that button that was constantly on the ‘on’ position in my own head and on ‘off’ in everyone elses.  I wanted everyone on Tottenham Court Road to suddenly stop and look at one another and say: ‘I exist.  You exist.  We exist.’ 

            Screw work.  Screw lunch.  Screw bills.  I wanted to make everyone look at the world with wonder again.

            Yes, in those days, I was a megalomaniac with socialist pretensions.

            I will never forget when I first met you, although, sometimes, I tend to forget a great deal about the time we shared together, I know it disappoints those bloodsuckers in the media, but my brain was never very good at retaining the normal, everyday things in life, even back then.

            I was coming off the tube at Waterloo Station, it was a Friday, I’d been having a drink with my friends, I was tired, I wanted to get home and sleep.  In short, I was feeling the same as every other passenger on the train.  Someone had got really crabby, it was the rush hour, there were too many people packed into one carriage, that’s the British transport system for you.  This someone, a youth in a baseball cap and Adidas tracksuit bottoms who’d evidently never taken the tube at peak hour before, believed that he, if no one else, should have the right to occupy as much space as he wanted.  The fifty-something businessman beside him, poor chap, was trying desperately not to elbow him in the ribs, but the train was jolting so much, what could he do about it?  Everyone fears youth these days – I’d been on the brunt end of that kind of assumption before, but sadly, Fifty-Something had been justified in his terror of the Adidas Yob.  When the train stopped in Waterloo, and almost everyone had swarmed off in that almost transcendent state of relief, Adidas Yob had decked Fifty-Something to the ground with a well-placed right hook; he had then proceeded, very methodically, to kick the man’s head in.

            It was a mercy that Fifty-Something didn’t get trampled over by the swarm of commuters in the process.

            You and I, I suppose we liked to think we were good people, back then, upright citizens when the time called for it.  You rushed out from the swarm of suits like a knight in shining armour; you tackled Adidas Yob, Adidas Yob got scared and scarpered, and no one tried to stop him, most people hadn’t even seen what was going on, others probably thought he’d give them what for too.

            I was the one who caught Fifty-Something when he keeled over.  I was the one who put him into the recovery position and wiped the blood from his head, although I don’t know why I did, to be honest I would have thought I was too shocked to do anything – I’d never felt so light-headed in my life, my heart had never beaten so fast, not even when I first fell in love.  Some granny called 999 and asked for an ambulance; I had to constantly reassure Fifty-Something that I had his glasses, that they were still intact.  He seemed lucid enough, despite the fact that his skull had been cracked open and there was blood pouring into my lap.  You came along and said you were going to find the station guard, although I don’t think you found him.  Eight minutes later, the ambulance came, which I have to say was record timing.  I told Fifty-Something everything was going to be okay.  He asked me whether I had his glasses.

            So the ambulance crew carted Fifty-Something off – the police were never called so you and Granny and I offered to give our names and addresses as witnesses encase a statement was needed.  The ambulance crew looked doubtful – too many people got beaten up by youths nowadays, it was a daily occurrence, why bother pressing charges?  The police would never find the culprit anyway.  They took down our details, half begrudging, half bemused.  I often wonder now whether we were only doing the kind of thing that witnesses do in TV dramas.  Most probably, yes.

            Granny disappeared, I don’t know where.  I was covered in blood, dazed.  You said, ‘bloody hell, what a day’, or words to that effect.  I said that this was the first time I’d ever experienced a public display of real, unadulterated violence.  I remarked that until that moment I’d never realised how much TV and the movies had conspired to desensitise me.  You smiled.  Now that I come to think about it, it was that smile that did it.  It wasn’t placating, it wasn’t cajoling, it wasn’t indulging or patronising, it was just an expression of complete and utter understanding.  It was the kind of smile that said, ‘God, someone in this crazy, godforsaken world thinks the same way I do.’

            What did you say? ‘We should go topside, I’m dying for a smoke.’

            As soon as we got out the station, you lit up.  I’d always hated men who smoked.  You, in your greasy jacket, with your unkempt black hair and five o’clock shadow, you were the sort of man I’d always mistrusted and despised.  (Now I see why it is that the press always liked to pick on you.)  You had dark eyes.  You smoked that cigarette with a certain finesse I was certain no other smoker possessed.  Me, self-professed infallible with a seventh sense, spent the whole of that ensuing evening looking at your fingers and your mouth, and, when our gazes were brave enough to connect, your eyes.

            I still don’t believe I really know what love is.  But when I sit back and think about that evening, and manage somehow to recollect the fading memory of watching your fingers and your mouth and your eyes, I think I know what it is, I really do come to think so.

            It turned out you lived two blocks from me.  We’d probably crossed one another a dozen times on the street, only it’d taken a crisis of everyday life to cause us to collide the way we did, in a starburst of implacable, inexpressible sensation.  The fact that I had never noticed you on the street made me realise that, all the while I’d fancied I was being astute by wondering what was going on in the minds of passers-by, I wasn’t actually half as perceptive as I thought I was.  I was, in fact, just like everyone else.  That made it all the much easier to fall in love.  You were a bartender with a criminal record for marijuana possession and theft and a passion for The Communist Manifesto.  Tonight was your night off.  Your dad had just died, you’d just returned from Dublin for the funeral.  Perhaps that was why you laughed so much, why you insisted we trawl through London’s cafes; I’d never seen anyone drink so much coffee.  I don’t think you really wanted to go to sleep that night.  You didn’t want to go home either, but by the time we’d finished chatting it was already past midnight, the last train home had gone anyhow.

            We booked into a bed and breakfast on Tavistock Place, a place where they seemed to know you, a place where they didn’t bat an eyelid at the blood on my patched up jeans.  I can’t remember much about the room except that it reeked of ten years worth of stale tobacco and that the bed had creaked something vicious – I’m sure the other guests must have heard it all the way down the corridor.  We made love with a desperation and a single-mindedness that pained us both.  At least, it pained me because when I felt you inside me, I suddenly realised that I’d never felt passion like the kind I felt when you put your lips on me; I’d never felt it before when I’d always thought I was so passionate, and suddenly I knew how transient passion really was.  And I think it pained you because when I heard you cry out, there was such sorrow and ecstasy in your voice that it cut me to the core, although I’ll never really know why you sounded so sad when you came; you never told me.

            You remade me.  At the time, it was the most wonderful thing, but now, I despise you for stripping away all my twenty-two years worth of perceived uniqueness.  I was reborn as your creation, I would have done anything for you.  The first few months, I hardly knew myself, none of the dreams I’d had previously mattered anymore, they paled in comparison to you.  All I’d ever written before you suddenly became contrived and convoluted, messy and idyllic, extravagant and superfluous.  You became my writing.  You became both inspiration and end result.  You were both my muse and my masterpiece.  Everything I wrote in that period revolved around you.  That is why, now, I feel that I am doing us both in injustice by dredging up our shared past.  It’s done, it’s gone, it’s over – as such, now I am able to write about you objectively.  Or so I like to believe.

            I became, in essence, the thing I’d always hated, and I loved it.  I got a routine, and that routine was you.  After I moved in with you, I got a job and went out into the real world, that is the world of 9-5, 24-7; I translated articles for an internet company in Canary Wharf.  What the hell, it seemed the right thing to do.  I worked days, you worked nights.  There was that peculiar period during the day when we’d clash, on the way in and out of work.  If we could make it, if we were feeling dangerous enough, we’d fuck passionately in those precious fifteen minutes before the clock inevitably drew us apart again.  I’d never known anyone who could make that small window of fifteen minutes last like a lifetime!  You excelled at that, you were something of a time traveller, I fancied – somehow you’d make it last, you’d spend what seemed like absolute hours meticulously pressing kisses down my neck and my clavicle and my arm before leaving.  It was like some insane ritual – although I’ll admit, you were always a bit ritualistic in that way – kissing me was your fetish; you’d do it with such patience and reverence that I came to believe that you’d never be able to get through the night without it.  Even when I saw that strange intensity in your eyes, I didn’t question it, I didn’t because I’d finally found passion, I finally had something to write about, and goddammit, I wasn’t going to let that go.

            People asked me whether I knew you were into drugs.  Of course I did.  I wasn’t stupid.  I take little comfort in the fact that you swore you’d come off them for me.  I believed you, for a while, until I’d come home and find the evidence of your misdemeanours, there’d be cooks and hypes all over the floor, and moreover, the tell-tale marks up your arm.  Why did you do that to yourself?  You were so beautiful.  I’d lie awake and wait for you to come back; you’d flop on the bed, I’d think you had passed out, but then you’d cry.  I was too scared to hold you; I was too scared to hear the evidence of your own weakness, I was too scared you’d tell me it was over.

            Passion is a transient thing.  And what did I have left?  Love?

            To this day, I still don’t know.

            Anyhow, it all unravelled as it only could have done; I don’t know how you managed it but you became unshakably convinced that your boss was going to kill you.  To my everlasting regret, I never did ask you exactly what happened – every time I asked you, you’d start crying; maybe it was the guilt, I don’t know.  All I know was, it had something to do with the heroin and it had something to do with money.  You stopped going to work, you were so afraid, you fell into a deep depression, you wouldn’t even move from the couch or the TV.  I’d come home and sometimes you’d be insensate; sometimes you’d be pacing back and forth, back and forth, like a trammelled animal – that was what scared me the most.  You’d talk about killing your boss before he killed you; you’d tell me exactly how you’d do it, hypothetically, of course – I don’t think we believed we’d actually go out and do the damn thing.  I sat and listened.  I have a memory of us sitting at the dinner table, you gesticulating wildly, hair dishevelled, skin pale as the Irish banshee; me, putting cheese and macaroni into my mouth, hiccing because I was trying to hold back tears, but you never noticed, not once.  I made a decision not to challenge you.  I don’t know which one of us was the more insane.  You had been the source of a passion I’d never had – now you had taken it away.  It’s always the same, isn’t it?  You try to fill up the gap with something else, and if you can’t, you drift apart.  But I couldn’t leave you.  I just couldn’t.  I had become a creature of your conception, and I couldn’t let you – my last bastion in this dull and dreary world – fall apart, otherwise I, too, would crumble.

            Now, I can only suppose that what passion I had lost had been overwhelmed by your sense of paranoia.  Yes – I do believe that that is what we shared in those last few weeks.  I really did come to believe that your boss would kill you – maybe he would have, I don’t know, it all seems so irrelevant now.  I was at my wit’s end – you became so immersed in your paranoia that you couldn’t even move for it.  You became crystallised, a shell, there was nothing left in you – God knows I should have thrown away all those drugs, locked you in the bedroom and made you go cold turkey.  No.  We were condemned, condemned by this great looming, ominous fantasy, we couldn’t let go of it.  I had to be the strong one.  I had to see us through it.

            I can’t remember the day, or the time, or the circumstance, I can only remember saying the words:

            ‘We have to do it.  We have to kill him.’

            And it did the trick.  You came alive again, you broke free of your chrysalis, we became complicit in each other’s newfound sense of purpose.  We watched the guy for all of two weeks, 16 stone of corpulent flesh and muscle; for the first time I got a proper insight into the insignificant life of an insignificant person, it was like walking the streets of Tottenham Court Road all over again.  I was fulfilling the dream of a lifetime, only by that time, who knew what my hopes and dreams had been replaced with?

            People, we’re all the same, fundamentally.  We long for something to define us, and what defines us is that none of us is truly different from the other.  We are a species based upon suffering.  We yearn for something better.  Some of us find it; some of us don’t.  Most of us don’t even bother searching.

            We carried out our diabolical plan on a September night.  Friday, September 12th the newspapers will tell you, although I can’t remember at all, not a shred.  As far as we could tell, he’d leave the house at, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 7pm for the sake of it.  My memory isn’t what it was.  I don’t even remember what he’d leave the house for, I presume to go down the pub, he wasn’t happily married, or so they say.  But who is, in this day and age?  So we parked the car down the end of the street at 6:30pm (theoretically), right by the park that he’d cross into, we’d planned it so that when he had got 50 yards down the path we’d get out the car, we’d chase him down, we’d bludgeon him to death.  It was all very simple, very clinical.  We even joked about it, furtively, like schoolchildren knowing they were being rather naughty.  We didn’t even really need to psyche ourselves up.  We sat in the back of the car, you’d brought binoculars along with the baseball bats, you spied on the house for ten minutes then got bored, you said it was pointless.  You decided to shoot up instead.  Then we made love on the back seat of the car, although I don’t really remember much about that; all I remember is your little ritual afterwards, the sensation of each localised kiss that you planted on my skin, the trembling of your breath, the softness of your lips; I can’t even remember looking into your face and thinking that I loved you, but I can remember the way your mouth puckered against my flesh in every minute little detail.  Human memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?

            As always, you somehow managed to make those fifteen minutes last; that should be your last eulogy, I think: ‘He could turn fifteen minutes into a lifetime.’  It was the only real talent you ever really had, now I come to think about it.  I still didn’t have my trousers on by the time Bossman went past, but I went out and did it anyhow, in my cardi and knickers – how the tabloids loved that image!  I was their flavour of the month, their under-dressed killer, The Sun offered me thousands to star topless on their Page Three under the caption ‘Drop Dead Gorgeous’, but there was a vitriolic backlash from the public and the editors had to back down.  For the record, just so you know, I would never have accepted anyway.

            Anyhow, it didn’t confuse us too much at first when we realised that there were two Bossmen.  I suppose you thought that you were seeing double, you were high, after all, and I – well, I was too far gone anyway, if you were going to carry on with the whole thing, I wasn’t just going to leave you there, was I?

            You launched into the one wearing the suit with your baseball bat, so I did the same.  We were both a little confounded that the other one ran off into the bushes and out of sight.  You were suddenly caught up in a transfixion of paralysed terror, you stood there, bat in hand, and stared.  Bossman Number Two was groaning, I was beginning to panic because you were panicking, I said ‘for fuck’s sake, we have to finish this off!’  And I guess we had to.  When does the point of turning back disappear, when does one decide there’s nothing left to lose?

            So I held him down, I told you to whack him in the head and you did.  I suppose I instilled some sense of confidence in you.  I think that in all the time we were together, that was the strongest influence I ever exerted on you.  More’s the pity.  But what’s the point in saying ‘what if?’  I wanted it, I went ahead with it willingly, I didn’t even feel any horror when you proceeded to bash in Bossman Number Two’s skull.  It was only afterwards that I felt the necessary emotions of grief and guilt and remorse.  You were very systematic about the whole thing, you might as well have been digging in the garden during the summer or something – the only peculiar thing was, you were crying as you did it.  Honest to God, I’d never seen a grown man cry as much as you, not before or since.

            So I held down Bossman Number Two.  You’d already whacked him once, before Number One had run off into the bushes, so he wasn’t putting up a struggle, it was easy.  I was never a particularly brave person.  I could never stand the sight of blood, unless it was in the movies, or on a computer game.  The way I dealt with you smashing in Number Two’s head was one of the odder moments in my life.  It was merely a transposition of past over present, a memory overlaid onto active reality.  I simply made believe I was back in the moment of our first meeting, when I’d held Fifty-Something in the underground and his blood had oozed out all over my lap.  Only difference was, Number Two was bleeding a whole lot more, the stuff was spraying all over me, more so than on you, and I couldn’t really reconcile that with the incident on the underground, could I?  Still, I managed.  Heaven alone knows how you coped with it.

            It was over an indeterminable amount of time later.  Number Two was twitching on the floor: that scared you, so you bashed him a few more times for good measure.  That was when we heard the sirens wailing.  Obviously, Bossman Number One, that phantom who had so suddenly sprinted off into the depths of the park, had called for the ambulance, the police, everyone who mattered – you chucked the bats into the brush, we ran off into the alleyway, covered in blood, there was never a hope of us getting out of that palaver.  Later, we found ourselves in an abandoned warehouse in some godforsaken place too many working-class people call home – drug addicts had been squatting there, we sat on an old mattress soaked with dried urine; you stared at the heroin paraphernalia littering the ground and began to weep.  I remember being angry.  There you were, blubbering like a baby for a no apparent reason, and my French undies were completely ruined.  Irrationally, I remember exactly what those panties were like – red silk, lined with lace, one of those coy little bows stitched onto the front.  Nice to feel I was dressed appropriately for such a momentous occasion.  Not that you ever noticed, of course.

            They found us about an hour later.  Damn those bastards, they didn’t even let me put some proper clothes on.  There was a big fuss on the street, everyone had come out to witness the show, it was like the circus had come to town.  If I’d been a more theatrical person, I would have been audacious enough to put two fingers up and protest my innocence to the shrieking throng, but honestly, I was too confused and emotionally drained to do anything but wonder why on earth they were all screeching at me.  I don’t know what you did.  I read in the newspaper that you threw up all over the back seat of the police car, although I reckoned you were too dignified to stoop that low.

            It turned out that Bossman Number Two had been Bossman Number One’s twin.  Twins!  Even today the absurdity of it all never ceases to amaze me.  A solicitor from Leeds, one wife, two kids, a boy and a girl.  He hadn’t spoken to his brother in fifteen years and had been visiting London that day to make it up with him.  They had been going down the pub to catch up on fifteen years worth of news.  Fifteen years worth!  It beggared belief.  I was shocked to hear it.  Truly, I was.  During the entirety of that first interrogation by the police, I sat there and cried.  For the first time, I cried.  They got really furious, they couldn’t get a word out of me, I was blubbing so much.  It was only at the next interview that I had composed myself enough to tell them the truth.  I don’t think the papers liked that all that much.  They’d wanted to run stories of false allegations for weeks on end.  They’d wanted us to blame one another, for me to say that you were abusive, that you hit me, that you coerced me into abetting you.  I suppose I could have said that.  But I had too much pride to parade at being a battered girlfriend.  It was bad enough admitting to myself that I had become so dependent on the imaginary sense of passion you gave me – and I was the only one who knew about that as well.

            So.  They charged me as an accessory to murder, although I think they would have liked to get me done with the real thing, but there was no evidence I’d even so much as laid a finger on the bat, much to the prosecutor’s chagrin.  Still, I got fifteen years, a neat figure; I was surprised, but then at the time, I hadn’t been aware of the media frenzy that’d been going on outside my cell – it did have all the hallmarks of a tragedy, after all.  Long lost brothers trying to make a second go at things, cruelly cut down by the twenty-first century’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde, lovers, socialists, malcontents; he a drug addict, she a pretty little wisp of a thing with no mind of her own.  They put a devastatingly handsome picture of you on the front page, you were all tousled hair and big brown eyes, the girls must have adored you and hated you for it.  As for me, they put up a picture of me from my third year in University – I’d just been celebrating the birthday of some friend I barely remember; I’d had my hair done and my makeup on, I was smiling like those models on the front of Cosmoplitan magazine.  They’d airbrushed my teeth white.  This is a nation with an obsession for pretty girls, even if they are accessories to murder.  In all honesty, I looked at that photo and didn’t even recognise myself.  I might as well have been looking at a lady in an ad for washing-up power or something.  It disturbed me that I was so easily able to alienate my face, my features, from me.

            They gave you life, of course, despite the fact that you pled diminished responsibility.  They wouldn’t let me speak to you, not that I much wanted to anymore, I had no idea of what I would say to you.  We didn’t part on the most ideal of terms, I must say.  I can’t even remember the last words we shared, before the police arrested us and led us into the blue and red haze of the patrol car.  I can’t even remember the last image I had of you, it’s been so subtly and insidiously supplanted by that seductive, machiavellian picture they put in the newspapers.

            I think it must have been about two years later, maybe a little more, or a little less, I can’t quite be sure.  We were in the rec room, and my cellmate nudged me and pointed to the TV.  They had that same picture of you on it, the one they always reprinted in the papers whenever a certain ex-lover made a kiss-and-tell at your expense, or an ex-friend had been offered a few hundred to tell Britain how much they’d warned you to stay off the heroin.  Wonder of wonders, you’d escaped, you’d done a Ronnie Biggs and smuggled yourself all the way to Brazil, or some other such place – all the girls in the room cheered (for you, for me, who knows?), but as for me, I was too stunned, I really didn’t think you had it in you.  And then, two years later, they showed pictures of you with your wife, a raven-haired senorita, with your baby son, you’d never looked so content, so happy.  I presumed you’d kicked the habit, while in prison – like you had a choice.

            Don’t get me wrong, I don’t resent you for running away.  If I have to be honest, I was proud of you.  And perhaps more than just a little envious.

            They still run articles about you, probably a couple of times a year.  I think the ladies had a thing about you, you loveable rogue you; no one wanted you to go away.  Half the public were outraged that you were living the good life in sunnier climes – I can’t really say I blame them.  But wherever you were, they wouldn’t extradite you, so you got away with it; you got a real life, gave up your ‘socialist’ dreams – whatever they were – you joined the human race.  I hope you’ll forgive the pun when I say that you really did have the luck of the Irish.

            And me?  Well, I wrote.  I had nothing better to do.  They all wanted me to publish an autobiography, they wanted me to spill the beans on you, on us.  They wanted to know all our dirty little sex secrets, they wanted to know whether I really loved you and whether you really loved me.  Sadly, I didn’t give the nation the satisfaction.  Still, my books sold pretty well, I have no idea why – I suppose they were all a bit intrigued by me, they had this romantic image of a gangster’s moll in her French knickers, covered in blood, a kind of latter day Billie Frechette.  Now I come to think about it, I suppose my books must have been mundane in the extreme to many of my loyal ‘fans’.

            I was born cynical, always have been cynical, but one thing I’d never do, dear, is cash in on your name.  At home, in my flat, I still have a pile of handwritten manuscripts lying neatly in my drawer, the things you inspired me to write, the writings that became, in essence, you.  Funnily enough, they’re all a load of old cobblers, no publisher in their right mind would pay me a penny for such utter tripe; but, ironically, the world would have paid me a thousand times more for them than anything else.  But even now, anyone would tell you – I have too much pride.  I wouldn’t print anything so sordid and maudlin under my name, not in a million years.

            So what has it all boiled down to?  You’ve just celebrated your son’s fifteenth birthday – at least I think so, I don’t keep up with the news much anymore, least of all with you and your blissful, fairytale life halfway across the world.  I do wonder, sometimes, whether you still have that fetish for kissing a girl’s arm, but then, I suppose, it could have been my fetish, because it’s the only thing about you that I can clearly remember, in every minute, voluptuous detail.

            And as for me – well, I’ve begun where I left off, all those years ago.  I stand on Tottenham Court Road, I watch the people going by; I say to myself: ‘I exist, and that’s all that matters.’

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