THE PICTURES FEMALE TENNIS PLAYERS DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE

Amélie Mauresmo is on the edge of the bed, hunched over an old photo album. She tentatively caresses the tattered leather of the cover. Is that a shudder to be detected in her broad, muscular back? She screws up her eyes, wringing out young tears. There is a sharp intake of breath as she wrestles both with her better judgement and the album’s fiddly little clasp.

She hasn’t noticed you standing in the doorway and now lays the open book out on her lap and gulps another nervous breath. The tension is getting to you – you’ve remained motionless so long and you feel the need to fidget. Meanwhile Amélie has leafed through a few pages, thick with memories – old rackets, lost relatives. You shuffle and the sound of your still-wet duffle coat on the doorframe shakes Amélie from her revelry. She turns around, shocked eyes open wide. The album is slammed shut and tossed to the side.

‘What’s wrong?’ You ask.

‘Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.’ She says sharply, turning to the window. You can see her reflection is wet with tears.

A Sea

Ossian Bone sits at the window of his cabin, looking to the sea. The waves – tranquil ripples – lap at the shingle, and presently he is carried, all but physically, out onto the gentle swells. Bobbing serenely along, he is afforded a new view of a familiar coast. He can see the stones on which he stole a few caresses of a beloved hand which, for the time being, had belonged to another. That night was a long time ago and the young girl crowding his memory is long gone. This county he now regards is one of teenage love, of hands clasped beneath blankets in the back of parental cars. It is a land of pure sentiment, unadulterated by rational concerns – one in which he has lived mostly as a little boy, learning to feel and experiencing everything with a blistering intensity, so much so that it hurts. Presently, Ossian feels curiously bereft. Could it be that he has had a finite amount of emotion to give?

He relaxes and gives himself over to drifting once more, allowing himself a little turn in the water. The open sea is flat, silken and glistening. His surroundings have been caught at permanent early-twilight as if pursuing the end of an endless, hazy summer day. Oh, to be ever-sailing in a little boat on such a perfect sea as this. All men find themselves drawn to the sea, but few are allowed to possess the rarefied sea of their dreams. He sighs, he could almost slip away. His mortal coil slackened sufficiently by the extreme calm. It wouldn't be that much effort just to give it a little shake.

He is returned to near wakefulness by a light splash to his port side. He has drifted some way out now, but can still make out the stretch of beach on his he and his father would volley stones into the trembling water with catapults - the boys-will-be-boys, impish weapon of choice. Even in his prime his missiles would never have reached this far out to sea, but clearly this fantasy has gifted him a stronger arm. The father from whom he borrowed his technique is a little crumpled now. Still of similar spirit, but aching a little more, drinking a lot less and moving with the pace of one who is slowing towards an inevitable stop.

Can one ever know one's own velocity, or when your arc will be arrested? Ossian feels a tremble in the dream and realises that the sun is setting at last. He has known those for whom this shore has gone unvisited. Those who rest. He wants to shake them back awake and show them the firefly streetlights illuminating the fantastical promenades that could have been. There is a little lost part of him that wishes to surrender, to dissipate across this sea. To be everywhere – to never be lost again. To never be found.

And there is another part which wishes to form a distinct shape. To return to land a certainty. It is these two competing halves that leave him floating, fluctuating on a sea that may never really have been there.

Zamenhof Awakes

'Hodiau!' Shouts the newly exhumed, skeletal Pole.

Mourners at a nearby grave look scared, babbling worriedly in conventional Polish.

The skeleton sighs, to the extent to which a skeleton can sigh, and proceeds to scoop displaced earth back onto itself.

POEM: Spring

We traded a friend for some lambs, this spring,

Their bleats unheard as we sat in a hotel lobby,

Drowned out by the pianist's wrong note.

There it hung, in the air, a soft discord,

Struck as if to announce the sour note which we all felt,

As blossoms went un-regarded.

I remember the joy of swans and curse.

And later words stick in my throat, letters catch in my pen,

A barricade just behind the nib.

Now, when I write of you, it is behind a veil,

Invested with all the clarity of clay,

Beneath which, I am told, there is rest.

On Futurism

Filippo pumps another slug into his wife just to watch the pistol's mechanism.

He is nursing a guilty bulge.

Eternity in the Kantian Brothel

Having made his choice, the nameless client goes about the business of satisfying his need. However, as he thrusts away, the thought of the gallows beyond the door keeps putting him off his stroke and he has to start over and build up a rhythm once again.

The temptress beneath him is becoming rather hot and bored.

Eventually he rolls off and sits, sweaty and miserable, at the edge of the bed. She places a lame, concilliatory hand on his sticky shoulder as he casts his eye to the door.

'I'll try again in half an hour.' He grumbles, dejectedly. Again.

She sighs, and lies back and wishes the room had a window.

Tramp Apprehends Master Criminal in Damp Alley

VV stands back, proudly admiring her handiwork. The wall she stands opposite is now emblazoned with her purple trademark tag, indicating that the crime committed within the building was her doing, and hers alone. She envisages a pin-board, covered with photographs of the very same tag taken from walls all across this God-forsaken city.

She exhales excitedly as she hears sirens, and begins to grin.

A tramp behind her in the alleyway coughs and asks:

‘What’s W, then?'

‘It’s not W, it’s VV, you cretin.’

‘Looks like a W from where I’m sitting.’

‘You’re sitting on damp cardboard and rat shit. Plus you’ve probably got cataracts.’

‘My vision’s perfectly fine and it’s an old rug. Either way, no need to be such a cunt about it.’

‘Don’t call me a cunt.’ Growls VV, fingering the handle of her blade as the sirens grow ever louder...

MANDI OCA'S LAST DREAM

Mandi Oca's last dream was about water and its relative purity. She dreamt about where the river meets the sea, and the brown divide as the silted sludge is subsumed into the clear, salted ocean. She dreamt about the distribution of all that dirt over such an area that it made no odds. She dreamt about pain.

Her dream took her back along the path of the river to the flood plain where the herons casually wade, where the rich and dirty flow stimulates everything, where oxbow lakes weave their way into existence for the geographers to say 'look!'. The dream took her to the glassy mountain spring where the air was so sharp that it cut her skin and planted in the wound a pale, brilliant snowdrop, nourished by the water and her blood.

She dreamt of slipping beneath the crystalline surface of a lake on her back, looking to the blue of the sky and not knowing where, or if, the water ended. She dreamt about the ecstasy of her last breath.

She dreamt of her water revitalising everything. Particularly root vegetables.

POEM: On Watching a Short Extract of 'For Your Eyes Only'

Deep-sea pot collector,

Embrace the flippered lover,

Follow the turtle,

and hoover the sea-bed.

Dance among the columns,

Then fuck on a boat.