same white scarves, the same boots. He was not in the men’s toilet.
Sitting there – an afterthought – I noticed that someone had cut a woman’s torso deep in the wood of the door. As big as a fat sardine. There was no toilet paper. I used a
folded sheet of the
Evening News
, part of which I tore carefully from the other part which was wet. It was water, and dust had collected. It had been jammed beneath the pipe under the
cistern. The ink had run. I felt a necessity to read inside the wet pages. When I peeled them apart I found nothing of interest. A well-known stage actor was to be married. The paper was more than
six weeks old. I remembered reading a few days before that he had since died. I couldn’t remember whether he left a widow.
I drank one small whiskey at the bar and left. The original impulse to find him had left me. The street was deserted, and the lane. On my way home I wondered why I had followed him. I
wasn’t after facts, information. I didn’t delude myself from the moment I became aware of his shadow, although in self-defence I may have pretended to wonder, to seek safety in the
problematic. I can see now I must have known even then it was an
act
of curiosity. Even now I’m the victim of my own behaviour: each remembered fact of the congeries of facts out of
which in my more-or-less continuous way I construct this document is an
act of remembrance
, a selected fiction, and I am the agent also of what is unremembered, rejected; thus I must
pause, overlook, focus on my effective posture. My curiosity was a making of significance. I experienced a sly female lust to be impregnated by, beyond words and in a mystical way to confound
myself with, not the man necessarily, though that was part of the possibility, but the secrecy of his gesture.
He wore the clothes of a workman, a cap, a shapeless jacket, and trousers baggy at the knees. He might have been a dustman, or a coalman, or unemployed. The hissing gas lamp cast his shadow
diagonally across the lane and like a finger into the tunnel. As I came abreast of it I glanced through into the lane and when I saw him I caught my breath. The valve slid open. The faint lust at
my belly made me conscious of the cold of the rest of my body. I felt the cool night wind on my face as I sensed my hesitation. It was the way he stood, swaying slightly, and half-hidden, and it
was then that I thought of his crotch, and of the stench of goats in the clear night air of the Tartar steppes, of the hairs of his belly, and of the stream of yellow urine from his blunt prick
running in a broad, steaming sheet down the stone wall, its precision geometrical, melting the snow near the toes of his big boots. If I had had the nerve I might have approached him then and there
instead of following him to the bar, but there was no kinetic quality in my hesitation. It lay on me like an impotence, cloying, turning my feet to lead. It was my cowardice which shattered me. The
other knowledge, of the desire, came as no shock. Still, and with a sense of bathos, I found myself moving in pursuit of him when he lurched backwards into full view and passed me at the end of the
tunnel where I stood. Did I invent the glint of silver? Endow him with a non-existent razor. The honing of the blade. When I couldn’t find him in the bar, and after I had applied my skill to
the torso on the wooden door, I returned to the lane and walked through the tunnel towards light. The singing gas lamp evoked memories of sensation, but faintly, and there was no element of
anticipation. In the lane I looked over the wall at the windows of the dark tenements above. A pale light showed here and there from behind curtains. Above the level of the roofs the sky was
darkening indigo and shifty with thin cloud. I thought: on such a night as this werewolves are abroad and the ambulances of death run riot in the streets. I kicked at the snow on the cobbles. My
feet were cold. I walked home with a sense of
Sitting there – an afterthought – I noticed that someone had cut a woman’s torso deep in the wood of the door. As big as a fat sardine. There was no toilet paper. I used a
folded sheet of the
Evening News
, part of which I tore carefully from the other part which was wet. It was water, and dust had collected. It had been jammed beneath the pipe under the
cistern. The ink had run. I felt a necessity to read inside the wet pages. When I peeled them apart I found nothing of interest. A well-known stage actor was to be married. The paper was more than
six weeks old. I remembered reading a few days before that he had since died. I couldn’t remember whether he left a widow.
I drank one small whiskey at the bar and left. The original impulse to find him had left me. The street was deserted, and the lane. On my way home I wondered why I had followed him. I
wasn’t after facts, information. I didn’t delude myself from the moment I became aware of his shadow, although in self-defence I may have pretended to wonder, to seek safety in the
problematic. I can see now I must have known even then it was an
act
of curiosity. Even now I’m the victim of my own behaviour: each remembered fact of the congeries of facts out of
which in my more-or-less continuous way I construct this document is an
act of remembrance
, a selected fiction, and I am the agent also of what is unremembered, rejected; thus I must
pause, overlook, focus on my effective posture. My curiosity was a making of significance. I experienced a sly female lust to be impregnated by, beyond words and in a mystical way to confound
myself with, not the man necessarily, though that was part of the possibility, but the secrecy of his gesture.
He wore the clothes of a workman, a cap, a shapeless jacket, and trousers baggy at the knees. He might have been a dustman, or a coalman, or unemployed. The hissing gas lamp cast his shadow
diagonally across the lane and like a finger into the tunnel. As I came abreast of it I glanced through into the lane and when I saw him I caught my breath. The valve slid open. The faint lust at
my belly made me conscious of the cold of the rest of my body. I felt the cool night wind on my face as I sensed my hesitation. It was the way he stood, swaying slightly, and half-hidden, and it
was then that I thought of his crotch, and of the stench of goats in the clear night air of the Tartar steppes, of the hairs of his belly, and of the stream of yellow urine from his blunt prick
running in a broad, steaming sheet down the stone wall, its precision geometrical, melting the snow near the toes of his big boots. If I had had the nerve I might have approached him then and there
instead of following him to the bar, but there was no kinetic quality in my hesitation. It lay on me like an impotence, cloying, turning my feet to lead. It was my cowardice which shattered me. The
other knowledge, of the desire, came as no shock. Still, and with a sense of bathos, I found myself moving in pursuit of him when he lurched backwards into full view and passed me at the end of the
tunnel where I stood. Did I invent the glint of silver? Endow him with a non-existent razor. The honing of the blade. When I couldn’t find him in the bar, and after I had applied my skill to
the torso on the wooden door, I returned to the lane and walked through the tunnel towards light. The singing gas lamp evoked memories of sensation, but faintly, and there was no element of
anticipation. In the lane I looked over the wall at the windows of the dark tenements above. A pale light showed here and there from behind curtains. Above the level of the roofs the sky was
darkening indigo and shifty with thin cloud. I thought: on such a night as this werewolves are abroad and the ambulances of death run riot in the streets. I kicked at the snow on the cobbles. My
feet were cold. I walked home with a sense of
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