If I look hard enough it will go away.
So I sit and I stare.
This morning I prayed for forgiveness.
It’s evening now. The sky through the window tapers up from the rooftops, red to blue, blue to black. I’m on a chair with a pillow tied to the seat. I moved it from the kitchen nearly a year ago. It doesn’t belong there anymore. It’s just the chair by the bed that no one else sits on. It makes my back ache. A strip of light shines through from the landing. I think about it waking her up and warming her cheeks, hurting her eyes should they open. I imagine I’m someone else looking in through the window from across the street, watching this room faintly lit by the light of another. I hope someone sees me, follows the light through the gap in the door, and writes down what I’m about to do.
Angelica walks in. She offers me a piece of carrot cake.
‘Are you ready?’ she says. ‘I’d like to watch.’
But I don’t answer her properly. I never answer her properly. I sit and I stare.
‘Did you know the Russians have a special word for light blue?’ I say.
She looks away. Sips her tea. Shakes her head.
‘Just get on with it,’ she says. ‘Before your fucking drink gets cold.’

I was feeling very strange. My fantasy meats had only led me further off into the distances. I went out and sat on the wall around the veranda and listened to the sounds of night.
“Sit back and let the evening go,
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely,
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band”
Someone sat down beside me in the dark.
“Jesus Christ, Mike, what’s all this baboon shit about moose and anaconda and shooting partridges or something? You got maggots in your head eating away at your brain?”

It was Eric. I took a drink of gin and tonic and looked into the darkness. There was nothing there to see.
“I’ve been to Kentucky,” I said. “I saw it.”
“I should hope so. I should hope you saw Kentucky when you went there.”
“The shooting pictures bit,” I said. “Jesse James and all that stuff. It was true.”
“So you saw a nineteenth century outlaw waving a frog’s leg around and shooting holes in the wall?”
“We had a bedroom on the first floor,” I said. “You had to go upstairs.”
“We? You? Old Uncle Tom Cobley and All? How many of you were there on this Jesse James orgy? Who were you with?”
“The pictures were terrible. Very dark. The holes went right into the plaster.”
“You want to know something, Mike? You want to know something about yourself that pumps the piss back up the drainpipe for me?” Eric’s voice had changed. This wasn’t the swagger any more. This wasn’t the safari guide always with a joke at hand. This wasn’t that schoolboy stuff. “There’s something about you that pisses me off so badly, I almost wish I was you. God help us”
“What are you talking about?”
“Two things, actually. Here you are swanning about among your party guests with a towel draped over your arm like some kind of tropical Jeeves talking a load of horsefeathers that comes out of that overheated mushroom cloud you have for a brain.”
“So?” I said.
“With all that imagination, you ought to be somewhere up there with Sergeant Fucking Pepperpot in the celebrity band.”
“I can’t sing,” I said.
“You go off to UK and America and who knows where else and get all these classy degrees. You at least should be head of the international cow department in the United fucking Nations. And where are you? In the mud-hole of the smallest town below the equator. Assistant to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Range Management Catastrophe.”
“Not much difference from being a safari guide,” I said.
“Then there’s the other thing.”
“Which other thing?”
“The Kentucky one. Who was ‘we’ in the Jesse James Dauphin of France jumping frog bedroom scene? You and who else?”
“A woman I used to know.”
“See what I mean? It’s all hidden away. ‘A woman I used to know.’ No name, no history, it never happened.”
“It was May-Louise,” I said.
“The one with the big smile? Who came out here and you sent her back after a week’s trial in the wilds? The one who rode horses? Return to sender. Address unknown.”
“She stayed three months and her address was 51 Mentelle Park, Lexington Kentucky.”
“So you remember? You remember her name and address and how long she stayed. Anything else? Or does she mix in with all the others in some kind of soup of all the girlfriends you’ve ever given a month of your precious time to and then sent back home?”
The river would be truly black now in the night, and I wondered what the catfish might see with the small beads of their eyes. They didn’t need much in the way of eyes. Their feelers did most of the work. Perhaps they were better off in the dark, like Gloucester in King Lear. His eyes were pulled out, but he said, “I stumbled when I saw.”
I couldn’t think about anything that Eric was talking about. There was no use in trying to work anything out. Things just happened. When I tried to think about it, there was a dark space.

This is an extract from Neil’s novel, Hidden River.