Eventually the sun came up. It was just as I had imagined it would be. And that made me feel a bit hollow and phony because it was like I was setting a stage for my own little drama, but it wasn’t really … appropriate. I was just a whining gnat perching on the back of Napoleon’s collar. I wasn’t significant enough for all this. So I walked away from it. I backed off. I wanted it to be all about her. Carla. I wanted her to be in the middle of it. Her absence to be in the middle of it. All the bigness. The grandeur. The cruel devastation. I wanted it to speak of her life, not mine. Her dilemmas, not mine. To represent … to underline … to illustrate …

Was she always one of them? And I just never … I never quite realized? Was she always one of those strangely hypnotic, cut-off, brightly coloured people? One of the stars? The main characters? The real characters? Is that why it’s ended like this? So dramatically? To make her a necessary part of their story? At last? Where she always truly belonged?

As I turned to leave, my eye spotted something sitting, half-concealed under a pile of muddy rubble. Could that … is that …? I reached down and pulled a tiny, wooden minaret from beneath all the mess. Russian. Hand-carved. Hand-painted. Humble. Functional. ‘Unostentatious’ (The Author keeps prompting me; oh yes, just like our love was – I suppose that’s what she’s trying to get across in her own typically patronizing and cack-handed way). Just lying there, it was. Quietly. Unobtrusively. A tiny, Russian minaret. Still perfectly intact.

34

Miss Carla Hahn

It was all about the extremity of the gesture. He had walked to Douai. Or he’d claimed that he was going to (how trustworthy is Mr Huff, though? Very? Not remotely? Well, if not remotely then all the better for me. All the better for me and my crazy, wilful act of self-sacrifice. I needed something spectacular to offer up, didn’t I? To tip the balance … to … to …?).

Ninety-odd miles! Incredible, really. So I was sitting here, on his front porch, waiting patiently for his return. I had resolved to sit there and wait for as long as was necessary. Right there. In the dark. Fighting off the midges and the mosquitos. Watching the badgers scuttle past like low side tables enveloped in old rugs to forage for slugs in the borders.

Sitting it out. On his porch. Well, my porch. But eventually I got cold. So I went inside. I had a conversation with the rabbit under its fireguard, drank a glass of water. Then I went to bed. In her room. In his room. In their room. Furtively. Like Goldilocks.

My dreams were turbulent (how could it be otherwise?). The phone rang and rang and rang. I was surrounded by strange lights and curious vibrations. Complete psychic chaos. If that makes any sense.