After the pizza we went to the sitting-room for video time. Amaryllis ranged the shelves, considering and rejecting various films until she settled on Notorious. 'This is the one I want,' she said. 'Every time I watch it I'm so afraid that they won't get away in the end.'

      'I've seen this film many times,' I said, 'and so far they've always made it; after all, the taxi's right there ready to go; it isn't as if they have to hang about waiting for a bus.'

      She leant against me briefly. 'I don't take anything for granted any more.' She shook her head. 'Ingrid Bergman was so adorable in this one and now she's dead of cancer.'

      'Cary Grant's dead too, and Claude Rains; Alfred Hitchcock as well,' I said. 'It's mainly a dead-people film but there's a lot of life in it.'

      'Ghosts,' said Amaryllis. 'And yet sometimes when I'm watching this film I think it's realer than I am.'

      'Feeling unreal is part of reality.' I gave her a little hug, just with one arm, delicately.

Happiness can be unsettling, like catching a baby that someone has thrown out of a window.

Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it don’t have no name.'
      I said, 'What thing is that?'

      She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you don't take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up sudden in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye haols. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.'

....

      Wel I cant say for cern no mor if I had any of them things in my mynd befor she tol me but ever since then it seams like they all ways ben there. Seams like I ben allways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it don't think like us. Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.

      Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

I flickered out and back as the job required and felt a little fuller of emptiness each time. There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs. Things between Judith and me dwindled month by month until we were no longer part of each other's reality. After half a year of not hearing from me she sent me a photocopy of a pencil-and-sepia drawing by Caspar David Friedrich: a burly eagle owl (Uhu in German) sitting on a coffin that rested on boards laid across a freshly-dug grave. A child's coffin it was, not fully grown. There was no note, that was the whole message and it arrived the day after her suicide was briefly mentioned in the newsfax.

I still think of that child's coffin and the Uhu. Sometimes I see them tumbling over and over in deep space with that figure in the blue coverall. And sometimes when evening comes and that little tribunal of the dusk I remember how, when I first saw Judith, I needed to penetrate her sadness that waited with its face between its knees for the rain.

Her no-question-asking stalked through the flat like a tall silent creature that stared at Jachin-Boaz all day.

In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff.

'A hi-tech plastic mountain,' said Dad.

'It takes a man named Flatbrain to think of something like that,' said Jim.

The next scene was a deserted  street late at night. The fog was so thick that the street lamps only made a feeble glow. Now there was no music, only a sound like the beating of a heart.

Something was coming but it wasn't visible yet. It was coming closer, closer, closer.

SUDDENLY here it was. Jim jumped back and ate the cold baked potato and the peas and carrots and salad without noticing.

Dear Family O'Soupus,
 

This garbage dump has been reserved for you. We hope you will be pleased with this impravement.

Betterly yours,

A. Worser

'Worser could do better with his spelling,' said Jim.

'HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF THE SUPERNATURAL?'

'You're too fat to be supernatural,' said Jim.

'I'M SUPERNATURALLY FAT,' said the Blob. 'WHAT ABOUT YOU?'