Dream

Jon on motorbike attached by rope to Amanda's bike. It stretches out and I call after them 'It's not safe!', run from dad's side.
A motorcyclist spills over. I see a gun on the road. His beard graying in places, he removes his helmet. No damsel. Jon and Amanda are unhurt.

Inside McDonalds. A waiter is unhappy. 'Okay. I'll look forward to it. See you then. See you in London,' says Jon to him in his broadest posh accent, glazed jaw. All laugh. He reminds me of Mark Phillips.

As I enter McDonalds, I realise my wallet is not on me. I step back. Stallone is entering, his eyes tiny in his head. I meet Amanda and explain, outside toilet.

As I pay, Stallone places a finger on me as if he is inserting a suppositary. His finger holds. 'Thought you'd have some fun with the lady in the urinals, huh?' He approves.

Drinking at a bar, listening to rap, I realise I have not brought my music system with me in the move. I correct Liam's hand, turn the correct volume dial.

Dream

The woman was in the process of spoiling the film.
I left my seat for the cafe, where I left without paying.
'Must pay two livres,' I think. I return to my seat,
lights flashing. Only the credits.

The show had been terrific. Michael Keaton's slow steps
hamming the big showbiz ending.

I give in, enroll in the army.
I'm told, with biro lines on a map, my mission:
to pave a circular area with bricks.
Andy, my cousin, isn't overjoyed at this.
I head back to my room / urinal -
106, I have to pull aside the other numbered hangers to enter,
like trying to find a coat in a cloakroom.
It is unbearably narrow and compact, barely room
to turn my face from the grille.

Each star falls only once.
Any apparent second flight is the result of heat and light thrown off by the initial fall.
Let me explain:

Ingrid and Rauel
recline before a grate.
Parboiling spuds, pork and chopped onion in a pan on the coals.
Ingrid is without child.
Despite her sister's luck. Her blackguard husband
scouring others' traps
reselling salt used to grit the hospital path; he is
rewarded with a son
Alfonz.
Rauel spears a spud with a pocket knife
and looks up.

Ingrid's mittens have the fingers snipped off.
She can practise batiq, sew, thread candles.
Her fingers red and plump sausages.
She takes the potato from her husband,
cubes it and adds it to the pan.
No seasoning.

She pulls her ratatouille, frozen beneath a cavity in the floor,
out, like a blood bag, and using the heel of her hand, snaps it in two.
She drops the smaller section into the pan.
It liquifies.

No envoy down the chimney: not owl, nor meteor,
nor angel. The cold air of the cabin drifts over the flame
and up. There is no heat between her womb
and the nearest star.

It was Gerard Woodward who gave me my current yardstick for judging a book: how well-named are the animals and pubs? In the case of August, the first part of Woodward's trilogy - of which this is the conclusion - we have Scipio the cat, The Goat and Compasses and Jack Straw's Castle.

There's an almost immediate difference in the trajectory of this third installment. For the most part, it avoids the 'salty howling' of its precursor, the Booker-shortlisted I'll Go to Bed at Noon, although tragedy seems to creep up on Aldous, a widower attempting to reinvest his life with purpose. Despite his visits to his son in Ostend, Flemish nightclasses, resuming painting and attempting to open a gallery, it is his children to whom fecundity and invention come almost effortlessly - whether in the form of pregnancy or appearances in explicit works of arts - while his projects are hindered by the frailty of his body.

An epigraph suggests that this is the Comedia of the trilogy, and Aldous seems bemused and baffled by his life as an elderly widower. A blind spot exists between how he views his behaviour and how others view him - something Woodward depicts brilliantly from Aldous's viewpoint as he turns up drunk at a school for the blind and stretches out on the floor.

'You just don't understand', says Maria, a woman he meets at a Flemish night-class whom he attempts to woo, and he doesn't quite. His drunken encounter with a young black artist in Ostende concludes in a fog of memory-loss.

If, with 'the house ... silenced' there seems less drama in this novel, Woodward's almost autistic fascination with houses and their workings is present as ever: builders come and go and their actions are detailed precisely. Aldous stares fascinated at the shoots of a potato leaving a drawer.

Also here, thrillingly and sparingly, are leaps into an alternate conciousness preceding or following Aldous suffering 'a fall'. Woodward employs the kind of meta-reality at the conclusion of of Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ or throughout Six Feet Under. In I'll Go to Bed at Noon, the middle volume, an alcoholic describes seeing a goldfish in the toilet bowl to a sceptical listener. Here Aldous struggles to convey the depth of his feelings, and pain, to those around him.

For the most part, we are in the comic realm of (a kinder-hearted version of) Kingsley Amis's The Old Fools (Woodward also references Larkin's poem). Where the novel comes undone a little, is in its apparent gathering of every reference to elderly people in literature and film to build its plot. Hence, in the least convincing plot development, Aldous's son marries a woman from a rainforest, an improbability which seems to echo Warren Schmidt's letters to a Tanzanian orphan in About Schmidt.

This book, beautifully observed in places - with its wonderful perspectives - seems a little like an afterthought after the first two novels. Yet, this is precisely the predicament Aldous is struggling to deal with. A book about absence and living after all your friends are gone.

Dream

I get a letter from Genevieve.

A female teacher asks for the riddle and I make one up; racoons, etc. I go to my room to write it down.

My brother's room is fastened with a strip of selotape. Easy. I knock. 'Who is it?' comes a voice. 'I wasn't being nosy,' I say.

His eye is covered by a bandage. His right arm in a sling. 'I was always bullied.' School has remet this weekend. It was a and b. We laugh at the surname.

c told me not to look back at my arm it was wrong.

'Your teacher was going around splashing paint for me.' Yellow paint, the riddle.

Dream

'I woke up and knew that [she was dead]. I also knew that my desire had fixed on her without her being its object.' The Reader, Bernhard Schlinke


You are the one who stays in my head. After you mounted behind him and he drove you round the corner, I did not see you. You seemed to laugh, or cough.

At the back of my throat something I could not quite cough up.

My wrists deep in water fishing for my shoes. My father's eyes meet me as I sing 'You've really got me' over the radio's derivative tune.

Waves crenellated like in Chinese watercolour, the tsunami comes. I tell my family to stay at the top of the house because there is a danger, as if I am warning about the risks of staying out late. Jon, though, is on the floor below when it hits. A surge, afterwards - like a tug on my feet - tells me it has passed.

You are gone, Gen.

Is that where you learnt your guiding? (NZ accent)

Notice this moment. You have made me tired. 9.9.2007

Dream

Anna R: 'I would like some affection now, please.'
I let her hold me from the back; non-commitally sigh in pleasure.
As she walks away, she tosses her mane - thick, unshaped in a way unpleasing to me. I look at Anna G. and wince.

In doorway, leading outside and into the house. People arrive. I offer them tennis (or some kind of sport). Rackets. I am arranging.

Dream

Anger with Anna. Stress at being late. She is being nonchalant. 'Don't you know what this means to me?' How to get to coach station in five minutes. Reception sends me next door. I pack but forget clothes.

In pub, man and a woman I saw recently. She is looking for something.
'Okay, that's it' says barman. Then man jumps onto bar, makes scene. 'Fuck off' etc
A man appears, at corner of bar. I assume it is the same man. I say 'I'm a teacher.' It hangs in the air.

Catch monkey. Its eyes blink, unmoving like a hedgehog. But blinking.
In its side a pool of water, with if not fish, something.

Old school advertisements, crammed with tables.

Fragment

I have seen my brother’s head
lifted clean from his shoulders
and set down
not gently,
like a net of ice
tossed onto the harbour floor.

I requested a steak tenderiser – one end diamonded with wooden spikes, the other flat – or more exactly a branding iron with one central wavy line, to push the mexican beans into a hash, to be fried into a thin hard cake like a piece of metal, the size of the glass of a wing-mirror perhaps. A brittle thin sliver of metal held together by skin and pulp.

I understand now. How the days without her were ten days without company. It took two days to realise to turn off the stereo at the mains to kill the hum. To talk to others was to be bodily distracted, to not share completely the moment.

There’s me, getting on a bus, with a chair
trying to find an extra pound,
descending the staircase between the basin, bidet
and lavatory, refinding the stacked trolley
in the aisle, showing my mother,
declining the kingsize pea-tin;
outside, the baby lies in its pram
and I try to cover its strong, upright
arms, aware how I look from a distance
before the crib; we speak as adults.

The bus turns down a neighbouring street
where another passenger waits.
I walk over a triangle of grass to board.

The only difference between the statues and you is weight,
material and posture.

Knowing yourself to be 100% I tilt you onto the
stylus of yourself.

In a park. Between you and I (sis) an orange-billed white goose arose. ‘I don’t
kick it.’ ‘I know you don’t, or it wouldn’t stand next to you,’ says owner.

Richard Madeley comes to the car, checks I don’t want any food.
Walks back saying ‘omelette’. I leave the car, follow him to decline
an omelette , whereupon I hear him say ‘pizza’. Now
I am more interested. ‘I wouldn’t have you think I was
sulking in that car,’ I say.