B - Hoyle would rise from his grave

Oh, K! Thank you for replying. I will certainly make a habit of
writing to you now. I promise.

Today I've done some roaming. I have been trying to find the right
place to write to you from, somewhere commanding. I went out into town.
I passed under the remains of the city walls, where the bindweed
sprawls its arrowheads, and I tramped in buffalo bur. But I was near
the ringroad, and couldn't think.

I went to the Victorian gardens with two poet friends, and we took our
shoes off. We found dead frogs and live frogs and mating frogs. The
sign said,

Watch out

Frogs

Underfoot.

Watch out, frogs! Underfoot!

Another sign told us not to climb the banks. So we climbed a tree. We
talked about setting an epic poem there, with blackbirds and the
goblins that hide in the stone. But I couldn't write to you, not from
the memorial bench, nor from the reproduction of the rustic
summerhouse. I was too nervy. One of my poet friends - Kettle - said
that the wood pigeons reminded her of funerals. It was cold.

God, K - I tried to be a nature poet!

I went back to Caley's on Gaol Hill, but couldn't convince myself I
was a prisoner. 'Fortune makes the heart grow fonder' no longer carries
cruel overtones for me, and I saw that most of the posters were of
people smiling. I could find nothing insincere in their smiles - no
hidden cameras, no gun in the small of the back. So I left
Caley's.

Then I bought some razor blades. I only started wet-shaving recently -
I attended to Mary's shopping list while I was out with Si?n, and there
were applicator tampons on it. I didn't want to be mistaken for a girl,
so I bought a razor as well. Mary owes me six pounds something.

Have you ever realised that if we were to remove from the country
everything that anyone had a legitimate complaint about, there would be
nothing left? There would be no country at all. I was struck by this as
I bought my razor blades. I am so often struck down during transactions
these days by the realisations of an idiot.

I took the river walk, threw aside the damp tresses of willows and
skimmed stones near the Cow Tower. It's conker season, but my pockets
are too full of tatty papers, receipts, old tickets and pamphlets. My
hair's in my face all the time. I knelt down by the Wensum and thought
hard about what you said. I composed the following response, which I
write from memory:

Why do you worry about the mortality of our correspondence, K? It
doesn't matter that the world will never crack us open. Forget
nutcrackers. Forget the nutcracker suite - it's nothing but an adult
dungeon in midtown Manhattan (I haven't been there, but I know someone
who has.) We are trainee academics, but so what if academics cannot
find Karl Marx and the dynamic of the theatre in a secret compartment
in our envelopes? So what if the man on the street declares our letters
alien, and yawns at them? What matter the yawners? What use the
yawners? Men in Parliament yawn. Tired women yawn. Hell with them. We
are Socratic conversationalists. I am throwing down the mantle of the
scrap poet, and becoming a full time correspondent. From now on,
everything I write is correspondence. Let our words flare like iodine,
and die in blackness. Let us be scorpion lashes. It doesn't matter, K -
I don't care. What matters is this moment of discourse, this sense of
burning contact, your hand on mine. The shifting about of volumes on
bookshelves is for Saturday nights and lecture notes. It's trash. I
love trash, but it is trash.

Pebbles in a bag rub smooth on one another, K. You and me, we're
pebbles in a bag. This whole place where I write - this terrace - it's
a bag full of pebbles. I like it here. My room, my dig, is my seat of
power, my broken throne, so this is where I have ended up writing to
you from. I went all the way out, and I came all the way back. Here I
can look the Canada thistle of the world straight in the eye and purse
my lips! Here I can turn order on its head and throw the devil in a
plant pot, I can make dresses out of bin bags. Here I am at square
zero, with my pages to fill. When there is nothing wreathing these
pages, the world outside is unimagined - it waits. It needs me. It
binds my hand!

The window is closed, the air is tight.

Today a man came to fix my light - it has been broken for some weeks,
and I have relied on a desk lamp. The floor is a complete mess, K. I am
in my dressing gown, chewing my thumb nail, and thinking that I should
shower when I finish this letter, then write down all the reasons I
think it is important to take trash seriously.

And when I go outside later this evening we will play poker. This is
what I intended to write about, K, before I started looking for a place
to write from. This is what prompted the letter. I am afraid of going
upstairs, I have realised, because of the five harpies. They have a
certain supernatural power over me - probably because they are
beautiful and I am not. Perhaps because I would rather just watch them
forever than try to converse. Si?n on her own - that's another story.
We have arrived at an agreeable point in our naked mud-wrestling, and I
suppose this is why my hands slide around her arms so easily. I am
lucky to have her. But the others! Let me clear the air with a few
jokes about card games, K.

The handles I find off-putting. 'Rummy' bears all the hallmarks of a
pet name for a deeply unpleasant disease, possibly of the c*nt ('Gin
Rummy' being the fatal variety,) 'Pontoon' recalls a small, leaky boat,
'Bezique' an Islamic terrorist group, 'Canasta' a kind of medieval
siege weapon, 'Kings &; Queens' a bisexual spouse-swapping party -
'Poker' doesn't bear thinking about. Have you ever watched Late Night
Poker? I can't keep up - the moves are too quick and loose, too much
like the courting language of girls, the code of their finger-drumming
- the game ends before it's begun. You are in, or you are out, in a
snap.

I can keep up with harpy poker, in the crisp evenings under the
striplight. You can see the lake from the window, and sometimes the
moon, so I pretend we're gypsies. But we're all far more sluggish than
the televised magicians on Late Night Poker. We sit around the H1 table
like stiff brutes, or German officers in a war film - except Besse, who
I must tell you is fast. She is the fastest and the cleverest at cards
- a real shark.

We play with change - hoarding copper coins in glasses in our rooms.
Mine is a borrowed pint glass, half full. A half-pint of gambling
money, which I take to the table and draw from. We drink tea and
coffee, and the cards fly between us like swifts and swallows and
martins crossing the surface of the lake. We take turns being dealer.
The money moves; mine usually ebbs away into the swaddles of the night.
Weak hands become open peacock fans in our palms, and we flutter them,
cooling ourselves. We find new ways to speak to each other:

Like a teacher of origami, I fold.

Three please, Hen. And it better be a good three this
time.

A pair. But what a pair!

I see you. I raise you.

An arcane tongue, K!

Besse most likely wins. Manley's good as well. Helen and I are the
weakest players, but we're the wildest too. Helen squeaks when she gets
a slice of luck, and cups her cards tightly as if she were holding a
bird. I am the worst complainer. If I don't start well I may toss my
cards angrily to the table before the first round of bets. I have no
technique other than that.

And this, I think, is where I am failing. I have no technique. Unless,
perhaps, K, you have evidence to the contrary?

Taketa carera,

Hen