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Back Adventures in the Skin Trade
Chapters (25)
  1. Title Page
  2. INTRODUCTION
  3. ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE
  4. AFTER THE FAIR
  5. THE ENEMIES
  6. THE TREE
  7. THE VISITOR
  8. THE LEMON
  9. THE BURNING BABY
  10. THE ORCHARDS
  11. THE MOUSE AND THE WOMAN
  12. THE HORSE’S HA
  13. A PROSPECT OF THE SEA
  14. THE HOLY SIX
  15. PROLOGUE TO AN ADVENTURE
  16. THE MAP OF LOVE
  17. IN THE DIRECTION OF THE BEGINNING
  18. AN ADVENTURE FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS
  19. THE SCHOOL FOR WITCHES
  20. THE DRESS
  21. THE VEST
  22. THE TRUE STORY
  23. THE FOLLOWERS
  24. Other Titles
  25. Copyright

We, said they, are Jarvis, Jarvis under the hedge, in the arms of a woman, a green woman, a woman bald as a badger, on a nun’s thigh.

They counted the numbers of their loves before the children’s ears. Beth Rib and Reuben heard the ten oracles, and shyly they surrendered. Over the remaining fields, to the whispers of the last ten lovers, to the voice of ageing Jarvis, grey-haired in the final shadows, they sped to Idris. The island shone, the water babbled, there was a gesture of the limbs in each wind’s stroke denting the flat river. He took off her summer clothes, and she shaped her arms like a swan. The bare boy stood at her shoulder; and she turned and saw him dive into the ripples in her wake. Behind them her fathers’ voices slipped out of sound.

Up river, called Beth, up river.

Up river, he answered.

Only the warm, mapped waters ran that night over the edges of the first beasts’ island white in a new moon.

IN THE DIRECTION OF THE BEGINNING