One night Clay wrote:

I have never observed a flower-pot intimately until now its hole is fascinating the little down of green moss it is of greater significance that what is within though you can fill it if you decide to if you concentrate long enough....

Up till now he had not turned his attention to human beings, though he had been surrounded by them all his life. In actual fact he did not turn his attention to them now, he was intruded on. And Lova was not all that human, or not at first, a presence rather, a sensation of possession.

That night Clay got the hiccups, he was so excited, or nervous. The reverberations were so metallic he failed to hear his wife Marj, her grey voice: ‘Aren’t you gunna come to bed, Clay?’

Lova was, by comparison, a greenish-yellow, of certain fruits, and plant-flesh.

‘Lova Lova Lova,’ he wrote at first, to try it out.

He liked it so much it surprised him it had not come to him before. He could have sat simply writing the name, but Lova grew more palpable.

... her little conical breasts at times ripening into porepores detachable by sleight of hand or windy days yet so elusive fruit and shoes distributed amongst the grass...

In the beginning Lova would approach from behind glass, her skin had that faint hot-house moisture which tingles on the down of ferns, her eyes a ferny brown that complemented his own if he had known. But he knew no more than gestures at first, the floating entanglement of hair in mutual agreement, the slight shiver of skin passing over the skin. She would ascend and descend the flights of stone steps, inhabiting for a moment the angles of landings of old moss-upholstered stone. The leaves of the monstera deliciosa sieved her at times into a dispersed light. Which he alone knew how to reassemble. On rare occasions their mouths would almost meet, at the bottom of the garden, where the smell of rotting was, and the liquid manure used to stand, which had long since dried up. She was not yet real, and might never be. No. He would make her. But there were the deterrents. The physical discords.

Marj said: ‘My hands are that chapped I must ask Mr Todd’s advice. You can enjoy a chat with a chemist, doctors are most of them too busy pushing you out.’

And Lova got the herpes. Clay could not look at her at first. As she sat at her own little table, taking the fifteen varieties of pills, forcing them into her pig’s snout, Lova would smile still, but it was sad. And soon the sore had become a scab. He could not bring himself to approach. And breath, besides.

For nights and nights Clay could not write a word. Or to be precise, he wrote over several nights:

... a drying and a dying...

If he listened, all he could hear was the rustle of Lova’s assorted pills, the ruffling of a single sterile date-palm, the sound of Marj turning in the bed.