Brooding clouds in the sky over Compañía Street. A street like a flexed arm, but the blow never arrives. I wandered into Víctor Jara’s bookshop, undefiled, but possessed by the Dionysian spirit. It was just what I was waiting for, just what my life needed: a hint of inebriation, a touch of madness, action. I wanted risk in every movement, knowing that in Greek, to seduce also means to destroy. I sought destruction. I made my way to the poetry section and stopped beside a volume by Pascoli. Take from each thing the smile and the tear, says Pascoli. I closed this book and took another, something more du jour, from Michaux: Man needs a landscape within which to rage. And then another, from the poet Alberto Santamaría: When I came down, I hardly knew where my body led me. Half beaten and exhausted from these truths I took down a book from Calasso: The Dionysian phallus is a hallucinogen, we know nothing of the fidelity to cultivation and only copulate in the wild woods. Finally I tired of poetry’s instruction. I heaped all the books onto a funeral mound fancying that by osmosis Pascoli would be Michaux, and Michaux Calasso, and vice-versa: Santamaría Pascoli, and Michaux Santamaría and like this agitating all the poetry until it formed a single compendium of verse that would say everything and then I thought: now that I have read these books I need to live some of what they say.

Recently, I was walking down Nassau street and I saw a blind woman, with a stick, walking in front of me, very quickly, in the same direction. She had bashed into several people who were waiting for buses and looking the other way. After she collided with the fourth person, I walked up to her and offered her my arm. She took it and the two of us walked, still very quickly, up around the front of Trinity College Dublin and toward D’Olier street. She was on her way to work and basically knew which direction she was going in. I mentioned, as we approached D’Olier street, that the old Irish Times building was progressing well with its renovations. She said that she had never known that the building was there. I worked as a structural engineer for some years in Scotland and Ireland. On one particular project I received geotechnical information from a two-acre site just outside Edinburgh. The information was in the form of borehole data. These boreholes determine the nature of the soil, from the surface to, usually, a depth of about twenty or thirty metres. This borehole information provided me with the nature of the different types of strata of material and at what depth these strata occured. I was looking at the black boulder clay stratum.

In November 1962 my father made my mother leave the marital home, 257 Cannon Hill Lane, a mock-Tudor semi in the south London suburb of Morden. I was eight, my brother, Sasha, six, and my father forty-eight. Over the following months my father became highly irritable, very quarrelsome, and his sleep pattern went to pot. Now he wrote through the night, went to bed around seven in the morning, got up about four in the afternoon, and resumed work on his plays and novels at seven or eight in the evening. One evening, he called us to the kitchen. He’d made one of his standard suppers, brown toast, mashed sardines and a sliced tomato. The plates were on the breakfast counter and there were three of them. He was eating with us, which usually he never did. He must be in a good mood, I decided.

At last Lisa dropped a letter from her window: “There’s a ball at the *** ambassador’s house tonight. The countess will be there. Here is an opportunity for you to see me alone. Come at half past eleven.” Hermann trembled like a tiger, waiting for the appointed time. At ten he was already standing in front of the countess’s house. The wind howled and thick wet snow fell; streetlamps cast a dim light. The streets were empty. At times a cabbie would drag by with his meagre jade looking for the last customer. Hermann wore no coat, but he didn’t feel the cold. At last the countess’s carriage arrived. He saw footmen carry out a hunched old woman wrapped in a sable coat. Then Lisa, the countess’s young charge, fresh flowers in her hair and a light cape on her shoulders, slipped into the carriage. The doors closed, the carriage moved along heavily on the wet snow. The doorman went inside and windows went dark. Hermann remained outside the empty house. He went up to the streetlamp and looked at his watch – it was twenty past eleven. He remained under the streetlamp, staring at the watch, waiting for the minutes to pass.

My brother owns a second home by the sea. When I go there, I run, most mornings, along the beach that arches, grandly, for a mile or so to some rocks. If I feel good and strong, I run on the dry stuff. One morning I was running. It was grey, misty, still and the sea waves broke and ran listlessly. It had not been raining, but the whole place was wet, as if a low flying cloud had grazed along the coast and forgotten a piece of itself; before it was pushed up over the mountains. On my way back along the beach I saw a large piebald cow stuck, knee deep, in the surf. It was struggling and looked like it would topple at any moment. I ran over and tried to lead it out of the water. It didn’t want to go. I slowly urged it back up the strand to the dunes, then onto some grass where there were other cows grazing. I started walking back to the house. I looked over my shoulder and there was that cow again, shitting and lumbering straight back down the strand to the sea. I walked on a few steps, then turned and ran back. I got myself between her and the sea, trying to cajole her the other way. Like this, we slowly zig-zagged our way across and down the beach, toward the sea – me shooing, the cow changing direction – until I found myself stomach deep in water, leaning, with all of my useless strength, against her dark, heaving chest. Then she pushed me over; I was submerged and sea-deafened. By the time I got back up, she was past me and almost neck deep in water. I stood there and watched her disappear; then I walked back to the house.

I’ve been away a lot with work this last month. When I’m away on my own, I catch up on my reading and, like everyone in unfamiliar places, I look around me more. One evening in Galway a few weeks ago, I was in the hotel bar, ready to have dinner and perhaps a drink or two before bed. I had a new book with me: Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts. Max Blecher, a Romanian, died in 1938. He was twenty-nine years old. When he was twenty-seven years old and dying of tuberculosis of the spine, otherwise known as Pott’s Disease, he wrote to his friend Mihail Sebastian: “I tell myself that Jules Renard died in 1911. At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I just have to imagine that I too died a long time ago, in 1911. I’m not scared of death. Then I’ll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I’ll stretch out, how well I’ll sleep! Listen, I’ve begun to write a novel. But I don’t feel that I absolutely must complete it. If I die first, I don’t think I’ll even regret not having finished it. What a minor thing literature is for me, and how little of my time it takes up!”

I throw up rarely and with great distress. It feels so unnatural. I envy people who can stick their fingers into their throats and heave at will. They’ll instantly feel better. The last time I threw up was earlier this summer and I was convinced my whiskey had been spiked. It probably hadn’t. A voice called from outside the toilet cubicle where I was slumped: “Helen, your boyfriend’s waiting.” I was choking on acidic juices. I struggled for air and began to panic. There was no air left in the universe. I grabbed for the lock on the door. There were tiny stars. “Can you check again if she’s in there?” I heard him ask. “I checked, darling, she’s not answering.” I took long, greedy breaths, coughing and spitting and breathing. He wasn’t my boyfriend. I wasn’t ready to come out anyway – my stomach and oesophagus contracted in unison and I threw up more whiskey and bile.