“What you doing?” shouts Jane. “Writing a book”, I reply, hunching my shoulders protectively. No time for doing a job, or having an adventure even, when there’s writing to be done. I’m so behind on this project it’s unreal.
It’s convenient for me to forget that no job, no adventure, no adventure, no book - unless it’s a ‘down and out’ adventure, requiring no money, or an adventure in the country of the mind, which is technically free. But I’m not Pirsig, or Peter Hitchens, and I can’t sit down at midnight and write until three, or take a slow boat down the Hudson to organise my thoughts. Anyway, it’s not just the thought it’s the grammar, which takes you this way and that, like the many ways to skin a dead cat.
At least I’m now not so ill. I've had a fever and my chest is creaking like a galleon but the unexpected supply of time robbed from the job and excused from housekeeping provides an opportunity, which I am protecting from all comers. Poz comes in to see what I’m doing and sits on my lap, saying, “I won’t ever leave you daddy.” “Thank you, Poz.” I smile, touch his beautiful face and kiss his forehead. Then his mother calls and he scampers off shouting, "A chocolate biscuit!" Every man has his price it seems and some just aren’t that expensive.
After two or more days entirely in bed, I get bored of just coughing and shaking and start watching some of the stuff I recorded off the TV. The buff, be-hatted presenter of Lost Kingdoms of Africa tours Berber strongholds and tells baffled local historians why they’re important Islamic artefacts. It’s the fact of him telling them that baffles most of all. He also pronounces Islam, Is-lamb, with a very flat English A. If he were to utter the name of the prophet himself it would surely sound like Alan.
It's lost on me and after a short feverish while I come to, daydreaming, in a desert oasis fringed with paused palm trees. There isn’t a cloud in sight and I must have paused it to bathe in the light. I remember this light, my body remembers it; stepping out of a building one evening in Jerez, past a flowering Jasmin; breakfasting on fresh oranges by a pool in Cairo. My dreams fulfil me and I decide to forgo a deeper understanding of the doctrine of Alan and head back to bed.
