THE CURTAINS ARE DRAWN, the room is cool. Here little moves, but, outside in the garden the moon riffles the surface of the pond like a swan, night in its wake. In this room Tracy and Luke lie under a spell in darkness. A penny, Tracy says.
Only a penny?
Were you thinking of her when you came?
Nicole? Yes - her just before, you when.
It's nice to be able to give her a name.
She's cute, and crazy. She'd be just right for us.
Yeah, she seems like a new breed of person.
Someone who'd be up for anything. She'd like to ride on a burning carousel.
She's a specialist.

Playing alone I found a wall and the memory of that place turns in my throat my throat my throat like woodsmoke and I yearn for some other life with all the sheets and blankets pulled away leaving us both upended in a puddle with the genuflection in it of the sky. We feel with the certain knowledge that our feelings will one day come into fashion and then be reacted against and then over the years the decades go in and out of fashion. Nicole is the missing link in this invisible picnic. Where is she now? Over then to Nicole:

Let's pretend everyone here is insane, she went, as soon as he walked into the Mad Hatter:
the bus seemed a small sobbing darkness that compressed both of them between chairs and people across the open field, leaving the deep lane his rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom where she awoke soon after dawn. There were lights in the three windows of the hotel they all got in their cars and drove away across the street. At first she started to turn on the overhead lights in her room, but only in creases in forgotten letters found the thought of this full illumination unbearable. It was light enough for her to slow and secretive, cruel and ferocious obsessed yet impenetrable find her way to the hot plate and start coffee water to boil. Then she sat before her out on the ice the children are being sick window and watched the morning come over the city her beautiful green eyes wide and dark with fear all those days had a dumb clarity which was about getting out building, she was apalled by its raw vigour which the moon rising in the purple sky a loose curl on her neck jammed in a window between green flowerpots she nodded again and said nothing the shock that followed this declaration a hot-blooded woman easily carried away on the spur of the moment dreary set of no I mean no one will ever know what happened haven't floated away on the flood apartments pressed together as if they were compartments in a box. After a while a weak light came on in one of the rooms and threw its dim orange glow on the black firescape beyond the window. Gradually Nicole felt the day seep into her she observed the chipped white paint on her window sill and the streaming windowpanes. She had a feeling of holding this room tightly as if it were a small valued object. She remembered the sound of Tracy's high-heeled slingbacks hitting the pavement, and for the first time her body began to react to the strangeness of the day. Her heart beat wildly. In the windowstreams she looked like Ophelia a strained expression on her face. She could no longer play these dangerous games. She was terrified.

The above is a random extract from my novel "Windowshopping" to be published in the winter of 2007 by Oyster Press

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