Now I have to tell you about that island although I don’t want to, it still gives me the jitters. But I have to tell about the island because it’s the first half. I’ll write the second half later. As a matter of fact I’ve been screwing myself up to do it for some time and I can’t do it sober, that’s the fact of the matter. Oh I know in the morning I’ll be going down to the kitchen to count the empties with no Liz to glide in like the ghost of something in Vogue. No Rick to go through the dustbin, the ole ashcan. He’s probably wandering about outside somewhere to keep an eye on me. Since Liz had the ashes cut down I can look straight across the lawn from where I’m sitting to the woods on the other side of the river or I would if I could but I am not able, it being about three o’clock in some morning. That’s where the badgers come from to badger me and Rick too.

Well. I got one ferry and landed up in the city where they incontinently shot the chief of police in the main street before my very eyes. It was the Mafia and I had some sort of idea that Halliday was using them so I took another ferry. I don’t mean back to where I’d come from but onward, ever onward, and found myself with car on a quay whence the streets were too narrow to drive along. So as I didn’t much like the look of the combined slum, hovel, bar, knocking shop they called the hotel Marina, I walked off into the town, to find something bigger and better with a decent bar instead of a plank held up by two ancient slatterns. I came to a gate, opened it and walked to some houses which seemed to suggest they might conceal one of those Italian villas that always get turned into hotels. I should have noticed that these houses didn’t have windows. Silly of me. Well, I walked into a kind of long corridor in one and of course they had ancient corpses all dressed up and standing against the wall for support, you couldn’t expect them to stand up without, I mean. I was shaking when I got out of there but the odd thing about these shakes was that when they should have stopped because I was no longer more frightened than usual the shaking went on. I stopped there among the windowless houses and shouted at them.

“The island’s shaking!”

So it was, too. Telling the living or the dead about shakes in that island was taking coals to Newcastle and no mistake. Well, I did find a hotel with windows and no visible corpses except the barman who hadn’t been used for years and they fetched my bag from the car and I sat up all night on the side of the bed waiting for the shaking to stop but it didn’t. I must have slept, but the thing was that either I’d invented an unconscious or had had one all along despite what Liz said and I dreamed, my God how I dreamed! I must have had breakfast because I remember wandering about and seeing that the island consisted of powdered pumice with knives of black glass sticking up through it like a feast of steeples. An interesting place for normal people but not for you if you are creaky on the hinge. I suppose it was there? Yes, of course it was because of what came after.