I can’t read anything since.

My eye slips over other people’s words like butter, as if they are coated, I cannot stick.

It is a double spiral: no matter where you start, as long as you circle to the same place it will make sense. I understand the structure, but not how to do it. The God of Small Things has changed me.

Later the same day…

It’s taken three days for us to settle, but now we are one amorphous animal moving past each other, limbs of the same beast. We have collected and coalesced. Jokes are appearing like ribs, a funny bone repeated, making sense. We have found our common language and our parts. Our eyes look out from each other’s heads. Nick-names appear. Songs worm through the kitchen and emerge as shorthand in the car. Conversations begin in the dining room and conclude hours later on the swing chair. We swim, come up for air, lounge and sweat. Today we went to the market. AS picked up a crumpled green denim to reveal a zippered jumpsuit made for me. The guy wanted €20 - had I heard that right? A few stalls down and they’re €80, but no. Funny Italian man speaking French like a Florentine repeats vingt. Okay. Deal done.

And I must learn to live with fire, the ever-present threat. On Friday I met with the farmer who talked of it, pointing out the slice of underbrush we must take on to avoid producing a highway for l’incendie; the cut is late this year because I arrived early. The waving mess of brown which once was green grass, soft and beautiful in May speaks, only now of kindling. It will take them a week to clear it all. It is another step toward prevention, a limiting of damage.

Limiting is all we can do. Fire will return as the woman who sells ancient linen said today when I stopped to say hello and run my hands over those undyed fabrics, thick with weave and marked by initials hard to read. It’s only a matter of time. And so through all my prayer and night terror and day terror and pleading I conclude I must learn to live with fire. She will come. We will be as ready as we can be.

The house asks me, Can you love without fear? I have been practicing.

Five days later….

H and J have gone, they left on Wednesday, J to Marseille and H to Nice. On Monday we took them to the funfair where their eyes were shot into the back of their heads and their stomachs into their mouths by ejector seats and triple bunjis and cartwheels that made me sick to look at. None of them could sleep that night. While they were being tossed into the air, S, A and me sat on a wall in Port Grimaud. The evening strolled by in all its little theatre. Two girls in matching frilly shorts and crop-tops, flesh competing with a stark pattern of cartoons in squares as if we could stop and read them. A tall and curving sulk in bright green skirt, afraid of her height took a photograph of her smiling friend. An exquisitely beautiful family of tiny afro-haired children corralled by a mother and father asked us to capture them on the bridge, her phone handed over. In cafés the football played loud.

S, A & J went to Marseille last night for the jazz festival and to be amongst the bars where Morocco would lose to France. B and me stayed home for quiet conversation in the courtyard. We explained things to each other. This time with them has been precious. There is better understanding of this process, child to adult, the changing nature of relationship, how to bridge. How not to find oneself living in a soap opera drama, triangulated, strangulated by cliché casting. This is what Arundhati Roy got so right, the maturity of The God of Small Things being in the structure of double spiral, everything moving toward or away endlessly on the pattern of relational geometry. Curves upon straight lines like the stooping girl on the bridge, human nature swirling inward, repelling outward like the funfair ride that flew them horizontal in the air. Against the strictures of cultural scaffold the river eddies, upon the bridge the girl stoops, along the rails the rollercoaster cars turn screams upside down and we bend towards and away from each other. I felt relieved when I read The God of Small Things. I felt allowed. This is real life.

There is something else I've understood here: it’s to do with want and ambition and I’ll never. It’s to do with known and success and my parents masquerading as achievements. A and I discussed it while walking a dappled pavement. This’ll show ‘em and now they’ll… - the headlines as we win imaginary things. So deep the carving in our psyches there’s not much more we can do but recognise. But in that recognition something has left me. There are more brilliant, award winning, talented writers out there that I’ll never know than ones I will know of. I realise that’s a stumbling sentence but also, for me, profound.

Eleanor

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