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Sport 7: Winter 1991

[section]

Once, wanting to show just how detached from the world we had become (how extraordinary), we marshalled meagre arithmetic skills to calculate the time spent playing. This was in 1978 when Dad was drinking heavily; it seemed like a good time to collate the absences. The figure we arrived at exceeded 36 months. We could have tried to master more complex sums: how long, how often had I been Carlin? How long Vlad? For which fraction of a second had Starfire's cunning consciousness replaced Earth's reverie (or what appeared benign as reverie)? Too difficult, these fractions eluded us, who, from years of narrative habit, had learned to guess the subtle inflections of a given character's voice, and even the smile that touched it.

Dear Elizabeth,

It is a fact that I always tired more quickly than you. On the second or third night of sequencing, caught up in some high melodrama, my mouth would go to sleep. Starfire is saying something to Ijlad, he walks across the room to stand in a patch of sunlight, his hack to the older man. My mouth shut, I reply quite by reflex, continuing the narrative in my head:

Vlad answers; as he does one hand nervously clasps the other. There is nothing inside him but tiredness and an almost compulsive tenderness. But there is a seductive quality to his weakness; it shows the stillness of the immortal inured to the thought of uninterrupted consciousness.

In the darkness of the opposite bed you have become impatient with my lengthening silence, you prompt:

Starfire looks out the open window to the garden; he's puzzled by the gardener who is, apparently, either attempting to destroy the traditional topiary or to revolutionise its permissible form ...

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This, obviously, is the Mad Carlin. The Mad Carlin has unleashed his dubious talents on the sumptuous gardens of the estate. Something, plainly, must he done. I am still not asleep, but neither am I awake enough to vocalise the reply:

The gardener is rattling away to himself as he attacks the hedges. Does this. . . ' he gestures toward the vegetation : . . represent hundreds of years of refined aesthetics on the part of the English upper classes? No! Not at all. No such luck! It's a blatant plot to trim the trees to suit the view, every home must have half Of one at least ... yeek! The ladder betrays me!' This last is screeched as the gardener, more interested in his soliloquy than his balance, collapses (followed by the ladder) onto the finely trimmed lawn.

'Hey! Have you gone to sleep?'

Sleeping? I thought I was doing rather well.

*

Vlad was a character well-suited to being narrated whilst asleep. Still sometimes, quite unconsciously, I resurrect him (or the reverse: he resurrects me) in my dreams.

In his dream, a stranger enters the room in which he is seated, writing, at his desk beneath the window. The ink has stained his ling narrow fingers. He puts down the pen, knitting his hands into a shallow steeple, and patiently waits for the young woman to speak.

(But that's not all.)

*

When Elizabeth and I were young we used to speculate about what we'd do if we met our major characters in the street. Who would be more shocked? It was unimaginable, but a good thing to think about at the dinner table when Dad, drunk, was holding forth about the corrupting oppressiveness of female-dominated families. (I would be trying to swallow my food, working on getting at least one mouthful safely down into the relative quiet page 159 of my stomach.) We never did meet Carlin or Starfire or Vlad or Cassandra on the street. Hell! We didn't even meet real people!