In his twenties he would do what he liked,

never stopped to think before he would print.

In full colour, too, not just black and white.

The money bled away faster than ink.

I am off-colour, off-line, off-print, off-centre

because of the yellow, cyan, black and magenta.

Along with the body they found a note,

taped to the printer and stained with blood:

‘I have run out of ink, money and hope,

and now I am running out for good.’

There’s nothing left at all of who I am

because of the yellow, magenta, black and cyan.

My finances are fading faster than the pages that emerge from my inkjet printer. I began to print out The End of the Affair packs only to find my fine-tuned analysis streaked with nothingness. The subsection on The Roman Catholic Novel in the Twentieth Century was particularly affected and my Suggestions for Further Reading barely legible. I cycled into town, blanching as I handed over the money for new toner cartridges.

Thursday July 26th

Love Letters Carved in Rock

For you, no ordinary stick of rock,

not some standard candied stock

from a faded seaside town,

no kiss-me-quick before I drown.

Instead, this home made confection,

its letters engrained to perfection.

Five years I spent to create this art!

Your name runs through its heart,

as it runs through mine. Red strips

of sugar, glucose, water mixed

into molten calligraphic stasis,

white rock pouring in the spaces

to shape the letters of your name.

For you’re as sweet as candy cane

and my love is – what do you mean

that’s not how you spell Siobhan?

Anyone can make a mistake. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway, as I sat quietly at the end of the table, listening to them all discuss Brighton Rock. That business with Liz at the beginning of the month had knocked me about a little – and I must have muddled it up in my head. Sure, that work on the Roman Catholic Novel in the Twentieth Century hadn’t been wasted, and a cynical worldview seemed to permeate through both books, but I didn’t have much to give beyond that. I could have counted all the characters I knew from Brighton Rock on my little pinkie.

It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I took the handouts out of my bag. I stuffed them in a bin.

Friday July 27th

It was all Darren’s fault. We should take 27th Club on tour, he said, and make a proper weekend of it. It had sounded so liberating a few months ago, as we anticipated our very own epiphanic Woodstock, in which we not only discovered a new soundtrack to our lives, but somehow better understood who we truly were, while sitting in a field somewhere deep in the haze of a golden English summer.