Or don’t start at all, if you’re afraid. Shut down.

I know how to create sentences, construct phrases, make sense out of obscurity. I have earned my living for years doing just that, but that’s not the point. Will i be able to discard all that academic carving and exploring and teach myself to breathe life and energy into those little black insects that are what I will have to work with? I have little choice. I must now try to create my children on the endless page, or live barren.

I will not be barren.

Roll up your sleeves Clara. Click. Double click. Switch on.

cccclllmmm.

Tomorrow perhaps.

No.

Today.

The rain guards me like prison bars from the world. Move. Get the fingers cracking before that guy, that Laurence comes back with his wet dog and his suitcase; before I have to go and have dinner with Mother. Oh God, i’ll have to bring him too and she will get ideas, mighty notions in her head. I can feel her mapping out my future, making plans. She does, of course, have an inherent dislike of people from the North of Ireland – a mistrust I should say, rather than dislike – so she will regard him with suspicion and wonder how to protect me from him. I have to start down this road if only to protect myself from her plans.

OK?

OK Clara.

The Gingerbread Woman

(notes, only notes)

A touch of the tragic, the comic, both there inherent in the title. Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.

Or should I say woman?

Vanity. Oh boy, such vanity.

cccclllmmm.

I have despoiled the first empty page, the endless loop of pages with six words, neatly centred.

I have started on my new journey.

ccccllllmmm.

Well, sort of started.

Let us not be pretentious about this.

Let’s just get down to work and write a book, like I told my mother I was going to do.

The Gingerbread Woman meets the fox – or was it a wolf? It hardly matters. It was some predator or other, dressed slyly in the clothes of a New York stockbroker …

In April, New York is at its most charming, the city and the people slowly and cautiously unwrapping themselves from their winter protection. They have survived.

The sky as I remember it was wrapped in a light tissue of cloud, here a fine grey, there blue, sometimes touched with a golden light; the flower buds were bursting on the trees and then sometimes a little wind whipped round a corner, reminding everyone that maybe this reawakening was merely an illusion.

It was the suit that caught my eye first: a lanky jacket with low patch pockets and narrow trousers in mouse-brown wool that looked as soft as velvet. I presumed it was Italian, wondered how much it had cost. I took a slurp out of my fourth glass of champagne and wished that I had the figure to wear such a suit myself. I envisioned myself slinking into rooms full of glamorous people and leaning against door jambs and walls, staring enigmatically at strangers. Another world. Fingers took the tilting glass from my hand.