An Elephant of One's Own

  "But why a sitar, for Chrissakes?" moaned Fabien. "Oh, I dunno," replied St Pascual, jutting his jaw forward and  generally looking obstinate and wrong, "it was a musical decision." "Sitars have been used in every genre of music known to man and they  always sound out of place. Hell, they even sound out of place in  Indian music. Of all instruments ever invented, the sitar is perhaps  unique in always sounding de trop, no matter when and where played." "Your shoulders do not appear to be the same height," murmured St  Pascual darkly, "Like Richard the Third." Fabien took a sip from his Stella, which is not easily done when  suspended from a crane 200 feet above a shark-filled swimming pool.  Fortunately, he was not suspended from a crane 200 feet above a  shark-filled swimming pool, which perhaps accounts for why he found no  particular difficulty in performing the action in question. "My  shoulders have been admired by...

 During those sessions, God stayed well clear of the room: not so Emily Newley, Connie’s vicar’s daughter classmate, who occasionally dropped by to sip tea and to look like a placid hen from an illustrated nursery rhyme. Like Connie, she read Theology; unlike Connie, she kept a weather eye primed for husbandly reflexes in unwitting males; she also maintained, at some personal cost and to Connie’s bemused respect, a laboriously labyrinthine coiffure that wanted to wow the Wagnerites at Bayreuth or to crown a Memlinc Madonna. She was one of those women who cascaded outwards, incubating everywhere she sat, and had pioneered, avant la lettre , that wry good humour later perfected by a generation of plus-sized American females. He found they had much in common: Tove Jansson (but she had read The Summer Book and he had not), Bert Jansch (but he could play “A Dream, A Dream, A Dream” and she could not, her instrumental prowess being restricted to Northumbrian pipes); above all, an unlimi...

  She started coming round daily to his room in the Rewinnes. He had no idea why, though he was glad she did. Years later, he would have been stumped if asked what they got up to during her extended visits. The litany of things they  didn't  get up to, by contrast, remained etched and hung devotionally in his memory, Stations of the Cross of a Sacred Dick Ill-uséd. As he would recall it, the two manqué lovers spent those hours liturgically pretending this peevish, problematic and faintly aromatic organ wasn't there, refusing to talk about it, distracting from its importunate presence with music and desultory conversation, while wordlessly negotiating the small print of what it might be allowed to rub up against, and for how many seconds, through the layers of polyester and denim. There were, he vaguely recalled, a lot of awkward, fully-clothed recumbencies and clinging adjacencies (bed, floor), and hands straining against the tight leashes of faltering willpower, and the...

  II (1980) At Oxford, as elsewhere, he dodged the spires and did the best he could with a name like Ambrose and a mildly dysfunctional personality. Part of this making-do involved skulking around Catholicism's back alley and overflowing bins, pretending not to be an atheist in the rain, pretending not to see through (and be seen through by) the whole sin-sodden racket. Having been raised a Catholic, he reasoned, you might as well leverage it, make knowing the Credo count for something; plus, the advantage of there being heavily draped supernatural quasi-people up there, more than offsetting their discreet non-existence, is that you can actually talk to them. And where most thy bins o'erflowed, O Lord, and peacefully ponged, was the Oxford Chaplaincy, which regularly laid on a party for unwary freshers, with free beer of monastic exuberance, and crisp young men standing around emitting paragraphs into the frosty air. That's where all the trouble started. Looking at her...

Under a blue-backlit slate-grey sky smeared with clouds and sprinkled with scavengers, on the lower edge of town, a dirt road curling through flooded fields is visited by a few ramshackle houses, dark and squat in the light rain. One of them has an uneven plank nestling horizontally against one wall, balanced precariously on hollow sugarcane joists, awkward in the water. The twin occupants of the plank, a sad man and a heavy wooden box of badly mixed wet concrete, balance the ends. The man can be seen at this distance mostly as the hub of a busy cloud of mosquitoes. Closer, you see him glisten with drizzle and sweat. The mosquitoes congregate in his eyes and ears and clothes, drawing droplets of blood and mumbled curses. Champear , locals call it, this dogged flinging and perfunctory smoothing of trowelfuls of concrete against the brick side of a house to discourage intromittent rain. Well, Ambrose Dulliance has had enough of it for one day. A woman emerges from the house, bringing...

(Nah, not "soportando". I don't do false friends.) The newsgroup asl (alt.support.loneliness) was my first port of call on the Net: believe or not, I was there before I even discovered e-porn. On careful reflection, I'm somewhat glad that Google coprophagised the first few terabytes of Dejanews when it assumed custody. Only somewhat, though. I'm almost certain that somewhere in the frozen wastes of drear - the intense, earnest discussions about whether it was right for an Italian maths professor to use words like "cunt" and "giggle" in his posts ( I thought it was, but what did I know?) - there must have been something of merit, or at least something capable of inspiring a little harmless nostalgia years later: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.support.loneliness/OJpJOzbYrF4/M0CpdcQ6mZ0J Or perhaps I deceive myself. Perhaps I did only ever write shyte. This reflection comes to you after I find myself attacked in the comments section of someo...