‘When you are worried, that is when you are working. When you are doing nothing, that is when the work is happening. It does not happen in the front section of the brain, Patrick. It happens in back section. Here is the subconscious level. This is the place the story come from. You just have to let it happen. Liberate yourself! If it is going to come, it will come. You just make yourself available and open to it. If it comes good, some day, it comes good. Champagne! But you have no power over it. It is all involving luck. When it feels like nothing is happening, that is when it is all happening. And remember that when you are worried, you are working.’

Still I search for a more succinct explanation of how it all occurs, but I know I will not find one.

vii

It was in odd scraps and rags that Silvija’s own story came through to me. Mostly in the small hours, when deep in her cups and whuzzled from the hashpipe, when in that borderland between wakefulness and sleeping, with her eyes half closed, wrapped in blankets against the night chill, this is when she would tell me of the viking-level horrors she had witnessed and been a part of: the rape, the pillage, the evil marauding. War-lands I could not imagine. And Silvija as a scared child among it all – Silvija scared was even harder to imagine. Such a story I had in my selfish way yearned for – maybe I could steal it, and recast it, and it would lend my work the gravitas it lacked; writers are such maggots, especially the young ones – but as she fed it to me in these night-time crumbs, I could not even begin to process the detail. I have made myself forget most of it. I know that she had as a kid dispensed blow jobs for soup money. She had been tied up in a facility once and brutalised with a broom handle. She had escaped but only to long broken years trailing madly through the squats of Barcelona (held captive once by a Sudanese in El Born, she had been made to eat catfood) and then there was a period of homelessness in Genoa (she cracked up and became obsessed with reading the words of the streetname signs backwards – Via Garibaldi … Idlabirag) and it was Berlin before she recovered, it was Berlin where she found her talents and the balance of her humours and the makings of a hard shell.

Nights at the studio she would go to the bathroom and spit blood in the sink. She would wash it away but I would find on the porcelain smeared traces in the mornings.

viii