She let the knives fall by her feet. The night about was breathing, unwebbed, darkscreened. She picked the first knife up, a serrated-edge breadknife, and she swung a few practice turns of an overarm arching movement, and then she threw the knife far out into the night. The way the ball of her arm twisted so efficiently in the shoulder socket – the satisfaction of that. She threw all of the knives – one by one – and each was taken by the dark and she could not see but could feel the way each was taken noiselessly by the boggy ground.

She went back inside and wrapped herself in the first thing she could find – his hipster duffelcoat, in a retro mustard shade, from the rack; waft of fathermusk.

And she stepped outside again, to be among it, and she walked in bare feet to the high vantage. She looked down on the dark of Clew Bay and the tiny islands that lay in the murk. The cloudbank shifted, a fraction, as though cued by a smiling choreographer, and light fell from the quartermoon and picked out a single island – a low, oblong shape – and it was lit for a moment’s slow reveal. She took a step that was a step outside, yet again, as though from a chrysalis, or trap. Darkly below the moving sheets of water were reliable, never-changing, mesmeric. The hill shapes picked out against the night; the islands, and the Atlantic beyond. She sat on the wet ground. She closed her eyes and knitted her hands around her knees. She huddled closer to herself, and went deeper. She closed her eyes and allowed the world without to fade, for a small while anyway, and for a half a minute, and then a whole one – and then more – there was something just a little like sleep.

Berlin Arkonaplatz – My Lesbian Summer

BERLIN ARKONAPLATZ – MY
LESBIAN SUMMER

i

SILVIJA TURNED TO me from the studio couch and said:

‘Patrick, I am going to teach you everything you need to know about the female genitalia.’

I was at this moment twenty-one years old and coming to terms with the cold hard fact of my genius.

‘But I’ve got a terrible trembling sensation in my hands,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure now is the ideal time for genitals.’

‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘You are not going to be using your hands.’

She sat on the couch, in her underwear, with a scarred Macbook perched on her strong, thin, walnut-cracker thighs. She smoked as only a Slav can smoke – devouring her smoke. She had a flicky fringe and superstar cheekbones. Technically, she was lesbian, but there appeared to be movement on the matter.

‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘Take your clothes off and get out of bed.’