– They are playing a movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird.

– The Harper Lee novel?

– That is the very one.

– I do want to hold hands with you, however films of novels make me uneasy. They’re trying to steal words and put them into boxes. It’s not where the worlds of novels are meant to be. My words exist in here you see, in my mind. Then they exist in your mind. Nobody else gets to see how they pass between us – it is a form of alchemy! Of all the art forms writing is the most intimate and strange. I’ll never see how you see the world I’ve created. You can’t ever really see what I see either, no? Still, we somehow meet each other in that world, or recognise in each other that we’ve both been there.

He lays on top of John, bares his teeth.

– Is that a yes, Bill?

– Films are often just moving adverts for fuckability.

– You have that.

– So does Monroe, but I don’t want to watch her mutilate Miller.

– So harsh!

There are cut-out words stuck all over the television.

– Words belong out in the ether – out in the programme. They are the very first virus.

John sits in between his lover’s legs and rests his head on his thigh. He strokes his ankle and smokes.

– They infect us. There are ways to go back into that original programme – to experience freedom from all these things we have to do in our bodies each day.

– I like the things we do in your body.

– You are too complimentary.

John watches him pensively.

– Is it true?

– What?

– Ach, it doesnae matter.

– You want to ask me about my wife, don’t you, if I really shot her dead?

– Not, if you dinnae want to talk about it.

Bill does not want to go there because whenever he remembers it the words and scene are clear as a snow globe he loved as a child, his wife’s voice coming back to him again.

– Let’s do our William Tell.

– Balance a glass on your head?

– I’ll trust you with my life.

– Don’t be dead on me for so many decades!

– Why, Bill?

– It’s a dagger to the senses, Joan.

Whenever he is in this building she is on his mind and he doesn’t know why.

– What do you want to know, John?

– How did you learn to live with it?

– I didn’t.

Bill takes off his Marigolds.

– They’re for keeping your hands dry when washing dishes, Bill.

– Not for jerking you off?

– That too, he smiles.

– But humans are waterproof.

– It’s so you can increase the temperature.