...a dream which has lasted a lifetime and was stronger still when I woke up this year?
 Call it banal if you must, tell me it's all just a fantasy, dismiss it as an obsession, run for the mountains if you like.
If you get as far as the foothills, I'll catch you there and throw you into a clear sea.
Where it's warm.
And where you can see the bottom.
Of the sea, I mean.
Not mine.
But watch where you tread, for it's so hot by day in the desert.
Maybe now it's time to come in from the cold of the nights...
You never can tell.
I can't.
Tellings have never been my thing.
I listen to the ladies instead.
Even the ones who don't behave like ladies.
But especially those who do.
Southern belles.
There are two (if not three) southern Belles to the right.
But I only know one (if not two) of them.
 Susannah, Heidi, Suzanne, Anne, Heidi, ?, Barbie ("please, not Barbara"), Kathryn, Ghyslaine, Harriet, Sandra, Nikki, Catherine, Sondra, Uma, Sylvie, Meg, Miki (Michelle), Diane, Ashley, Wildcat, Ellie.
Now that took some remembering, there were two Heidis, and ? is on the tip of my tongue. I'm stretching my neuron to find the name again, but I don't want it to snap.
She was Indian, met in India and just may still have the last surviving copy of my first novel.
Was I too shy to write down her name in my copious account of that journey?
How absurd. Perhaps I didn't want it to get out to my mum.
Five of these women I never met, and one, among five actresses, I did, years after she charted the course of my dream.
She was even lovelier older than she was young.
When I read one day that she'd survived an unhappy marriage, I was furious.
What a waste.
But then women are like that.
The wonderful ones often wind up with thugs.
If you don't believe me, just take a good look round in the Métro one of these days.
 Maybe it's cheating to include two models and three actresses who became part of the dream but never of my life, but our minds are richer than "reality".
One of those names was, for Marianne, my long-ago and very short-lived equivalent of three of her mother's fellers after me.
Almost as bad as the creep of a banker I would kill if I ever saw him again for what he said to the Kid behind her mum's back.
Things like "it would be so much better for us if you were dead, you pathetic little creep". The Kid never told her mum, suffered in silence rather than "hurt her". But when I found out, I did. Against Marianne's will.
There was the biggest explosion since Nagasaki.
I've not done too badly for pictures, considering!
I don't have two I'd like to add, but haven't added the one I do have which would make Marianne howl (if dolphins can howl).
If it has any significance, 18 of the 23 are blondes, and all but three have -- or had -- short hair.
Is this supposed to mean I'm turned on by a "type"?
 Because I would never have thought it. Nonetheless!
And if you'd asked me before I rattled and shook my tin of peas very hard, I'm sure I'd never had said "17". Seventeen!
I mean, normally, I can't even count that far.
I don't have enough fingers and toes.
Perhaps if I used ... well, other bits.
That's what women taught me.
To use other bits.
They let me start with their little toes. In those days I could count to 38.
One of them even suggested that I electrify her all the way to fingertips (whispered that if I managed that, then she'd teach me to count to infinity)...
I might have said four or five...
What liars we are to ourselves.
 Try it yourself one day.
You might be just as surprised.
If I've left anybody out, which I strongly doubt, that would mean digging far deeper than I care to stir the soil.
Who knows what horrors hide in the bedrock, like nightmares under the bed, ready to crawl out and turn on the alarm clock?
If there's one thing in the world I don't like, it's clocks. Grubby little insects.
Nothing but ticks.
Irritating things. They get under the skin.
Especially in the morning. Leave you no time to do anything else.
Nice neat things.
Like waking up gently to make love before breakfast.
Toc! Take that, ticks!
"I wanna die before I get old."
By the way, what the hell does "neat" mean?
Are you going to teach me another language or what?
 Perhaps I shouldn't tell you which one of these women was an angel on all fronts before breakfast.
A grumpy angel, sometimes, but always an angel.
In point of fact, as politicians and other idiots say, there are several angels here. Some of them are writers, two are painters, one is a graphic designer, and three are poets.
That's to say, I hope one still is, because after she left me to chase an American girl -- in vain -- across the Atlantic then came back for a while (the tail between her legs being better news for the tail between mine) she quit me for somebody stable.
And dull.
Last time I saw her, she wasn't boring, but her flame was flickering alarmingly low.
 But when she was fierily and fiercely alight I stole her from a very gifted jazz musician.
That act of villainy led to the last major Anglo-French war (which is to say, a mere family quarrel since the days of Guillaume le Conquérant) in my historical knowledge.
The cross-Channel 'phone calls were as explosive as V2s.
They told me about V2s at school, the older teachers with their war stories.
About the boy who said one day, "It's all right, sir, I can't hear it any more. The engine's stopped."
Though the pianist surrendered, it was with hatred on his part and no truce was ever signed.
But then most Brits would tell you they'd never sign a ceasefire with the French, even on their deathbeds.
 And that, I'm so sorry to say, was my only truly successful act of theft.
But I was too good for my own good, Ellie.
Always have been.
One woman I fancied is married, and I'd have liked to but she's wedded to my best friend.
Even when being a dismal, selfish bastard, which is rare, he's still my best and oldest male friend, along with a cousin of mine.
Hmm. It took those two a long time, now I think of it, to make good friends themselves.
The battle of the egos between another great jazz musician and the would-be writer who finally became one, very much later, was quite a spectacle.
I hope you meet the cousin one day.
He was born 20 days after me.
Our mothers had a race, they say, and mine won.
That was probably one of her biggest mistakes, since I've been a very precocious and premature late developer ever since.
Anthony, though, has always been the funniest person I've known.
But shouldn't we get back to the ladies? After all, one of Anthony's got most interested in me when she was through with him...
With two exceptions they're all beauties.
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's - ?"
I bet you don't know the answer to that one.
I do. Always did, it seems. Always will. So does the Kid, whose had the sense to begin to lose hope of meeting her.
And so did the woman who gave me 'Gaïa', with those mysterious words about it being for somebody else.
 Of course, the somebody else will never believe me.
I don't think she's too silly (I'm the silly one), but she's stubborn. She's not quite got the squarest jaw here, but nearly.
If ever she did believe me, I'd be the happiest man in the world. Or well on the way to it.
But who has a right to be happy, after all?
Trouble is, I've so little experience of robbery.
Outrageous cheek, yes, but not stealing or borrowing or pinching, simply massaging feet and "upward and onwards still to urge our flight" (as Goethe would say. Well, he did. In 'Faust'. And you know what happened to Doktor Faustus. Except that Goethe was merciful, like the composer Busoni in his mind-blowing opera, not like that French crap. They both, those Fausts, found Her before they died) ... and ... em, what I first learned properly in 1980 ("late developer," I told you.)
"T'es vraiment culotté!" people tell me.
A lot.
If only!
Though I prefer to wear hotpants.
When it's hot.
Not when it's hotter.
 Indeed, I was so bad with padlocks, chains and strings attached that only three of the most "significant others" had or have other guys at the time.
I did get within a hair's breadth on the pillow of stealing one of them (but I don't have a picture of that ... close-cropped blonde), or was it the other way round?
I think it might have been the other way round.
Until I did something so memorably stupid that she threw me out, since this was one of the few occasions I behaved more boyishly than she looked.
Uh-huh.
Maybe I do have a "type", after all. Could it be the boyish look that appeals to something deeply embedded in my most peculiar DNA.
Oh God, do you think I'm a chromosome short, as well as making do with one neuron?
At least it's a very competent neuron.
There's something almost chakra-like about the way it begins where my legs meet and goes all the way up to my third eye.
Bloom of the lotus and all that...
Don't say "bollocks!" It's true, my love.
You're not going to ask how many of the 17 I slept with, are you?
No?
Good.
I mean, that would really be telling now, wouldn't it?
I never have been able to tell a good story, you know. Let alone write one.
But I'm pretty hot on dreams.
Hot?! I'm burning!
Stories and poems are things I'm wonderful at reading to people. Ask the Kid.
Especially in bed.
Ellie. Especially Ellie. Got anything you'd like to tell me? What's your favourite colour?
9:29:48 PM 
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