‘About Curtis Worthing. She says he’s the root cause.’

‘The cause of what?’ Petra said. ‘Who’s telling us this?’

‘That’s all she told me.’ He took three steps and shoved his boot through the glass display case of executive toys. ‘She also said make it memorable.’ He went to the door, flipped the sign, unlocked the door and left.

Petra hurried after him. ‘Who’s she? Who’s telling us?’ she called down the pavement, but Freddie had already disappeared around a corner.

Suki was glowering over the mess on the shop floor.

‘Jesus. It was like he was in some sort of fugue state, wasn’t it? Like hypnotised. I knew there was something off about him when I saw him out of his plaid shirt and stained chinos.’

‘He’s a troubled man,’ Suki said. ‘He needs help.’

‘It could have been worse, I suppose. I was scared when he locked the door.’

‘If he’d tried anything, I would have broken his arm. I know kung fu.’ It was her usual brave bluster, but Suki was shaking.

Rose-Tinted Reviews with Rose Devriendt #155

Light out of Darkness

Elemental, Metamuse, Fjellstrand,
Norway, 14–28 June

The truth comes to me on a ghost-lit midnight shore in Norway. The rest of the audience are out in the half-dusk, singing joyfully at the water’s edge as they float the corpse they made into the water as an offering, but I’m cowering in the dank back corner of the boathouse, covering my ears, afraid to look.

That corpse is not a prop, I want to scream at them, but the suck and slurp of the water, the rip of the wind, is too loud. These things you’re feeling, I’d tell them, the hook in your soul, the fingers in your brainstem and your groin, those are not effects. They’re in you. You shouldn’t be here.

* * *

It’s been six months since I fell in love with a ghost in a desert hammam out back of a Tokyo supermarket, and since then I haven’t been quite right. I’ve been distracted, obsessed. I’ve put a hell of a lot of strain on my wife; she’s getting tired of my wandering attention. I’ve been unable to concentrate on my work. And without a home and an income, I’ve needed to move away from the city, away from the theatre that’s been my livelihood.