The third character sat happily in the corner as we ate out lunch. I
was munching and brooding on my morning’s reading, my girl was
bubbling with satisfaction at having successfully cooked my tomato and
mushroom dish, and outside it was raining. Thirty hours of light and
steady, the edge of some typhoon somewhere, thick sweet tomato sauce,
radical syntax for an authentic middle-class voice, the third
character. A monkey and a dog and an elephant, who had been busy
helping me teach twelve yr olds, shelter’d ‘neath a bridge, concrete,
concrete, with the guys on bicycles. The kids had been happy to accept
that the elephant sometimes wore dark glasses and read newspapers and
that the monkey listened to music on her mp3-player, but there had
been mutterings about the dog eating bananas. Sigh. The third
character is a ghost or a fairy or a pigment of my imagination,
colouring my reality. Too much LCD, my eyes swim. I don’t, in this dirty sea.