-the thing is the mind doesn't want a mandate, it doesn't want to gloss over things, it just wants to heal properly.

(said quick and quiet, no bombast, just slipping through)

- so we can take our time. and I think these things are connected. 

washing the dishes over in the wash block. David is drying. "so what's old Jimmy like, as a dad? is he a bit rough, is he?"

-what conclusion did you draw when he cut you off, stopped talking to you? 

that I was stupid, that I was annoying.

-but was he talking to you because you were appealing to him? 

///

- I mean, was he talking to you at your behest, because you were inviting him?

no, I couldn't even speak to him. I couldn't say anything at all. I thought it was weird just that he was even there, when had an adult ever come and done the dishes with me? 

-that's right. he was reaching out to you, rather than the other way round. 

but once he did, then I really liked it a lot. I think I probably wanted a lot of attention once he started to give it to me, and that may have been annoying. 

-so you asked him to play cards with you, to go for a walk. but it's hard for me to picture that you were annoying with that - it doesn't add up. you couldn't even talk to him at first. so maybe you asked him - but probably not ten times, not on and on, right? 

yeah. 

-and you were on holiday, he had done these things with you, it was a normal thing.
/
-I think you just asked him, that's all. 

//

-the only thing I can imagine might have been annoying was that he was asking things and you wouldn't speak to him. 

yeah. 

-but even then - I don't know what the answers to those questions could have been. here he is, a friend of your parents, and he's asking questions right into the heart of this crisis. what were you supposed to say? he could have just hung out with you, had fun together, like that, but instead he asked you things that didn't have any answers
....

-you were physically tired from the eye movements?

I was tired, and I was frustrated. (that it would never end, that one thing was just leading to another which would lead to the whole fabric unpulling, & then I'd be a pile of thread & his work done)

-you didn't need to be frustrated. you did very well, you went a long way. and you're nearly there. 

here is her head on my arm, hair soft and thin, damp strands stuck darkly to her forehead, & at the crown it's thin, the white of her scalp quite unhidden.

do you want me to carry something?

no, of course not.

so I will come without my things.

no - is there something? later, we can....

"The fatal flaw in Mr Rowe's treatment of recurrent words, such as "garden" or "water" is his regarding them as abstractions, and not realizing that the sound of a bath being filled, say, in the world of Laughter in the Dark, is as different from the limes rustling in the rain of Speak, Memory as the Garden of Delights in Ada is from the lawns in Lolita."

 Nabokov quoted in "Nabokov in bed", TLS 4/2/11

I slipped my phone back in my pocket and turned to the girl, who had filled the bowl up again from the tap and was washing her face.

"I'm going to get you out of here. I know you probably have mixed feelings about that, but it's time to get you somewhere you can be safe and looked after. "

She wiped her mouth and looked up at me. "With your mother? I'm going to move in with the two of you?" She was smiling slightly.

"Well, that's one of the possibilities." I was uncertain but thought my voice remained relaxed.

She sighed, then stood up and pulled at the door of the shed, which opened awkwardly on a last unbroken hinge. It was dark inside, and a powerful animal smell rolled out of the darkness. "There's something in there,"she said. "Rats, or a civet." She stood as though trying to decide whether to shut the door again. "John's been bugging me to get in there with the gun. I didn't want to, so he made me stand."

I reached over her and pushed the door to. "We don't have to deal with that now. We should get out onto the road. The cops are coming. They will deal with John, and make sure that everything is okay. There's some paperwork, then we can go. How are your hands?"

She held them up.

"And though  I find it difficult writing about her now, when I was a student my admiration for her work was direct and easy. I had not then spent 20 years disappointed with my own books. Having done precisely nothing, I felt myself to be, in all the ways that mattered most, her equal, and I neither worshipped her nor wanted to do her harm."

"The shift from feeling into fiction was a shift from being into an image of being, from inside to outside. 'To break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt,' Lacan wrote - and at the time I understood this completely - 'generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.' I think he meant you fall apart a bit, when, as an infant, you see or construct your image in a mirror. It is also possible that you have to fall apart a bit in order to make fiction; that making an image from yourself is a kind of falling apart. And that the image is always too coherent and rigid - what Lacan termed 'orthopaedic'."

Anne Enright, "Diary". London Review of Books 17/2/2011 38-39

Quadrature — historical mathematical term which means calculating of the area. 

quadrature,  in astronomy, that aspect of a heavenly body in which its direction as seen from the Earth makes a right angle with the direction of the Sun. The Moon at First or Last Quarter is said to be at east or west quadrature, respectively. A superior planet (outside the Earth’s orbit) is at west quadrature when its position is 90° west of the Sun. It rises around midnight, reaches the meridian (a great circle on the celestial sphere, passing through the north and south poles and the zenith) near sunrise and sets near noon. At east quadrature the planet is near the meridian at sunset and sets near midnight. At both quadratures the planet is at gibbous phase (more than half but not all of the disk illuminated), but only Mars shows up conspicuously gibbous.

Well, I took her away from the pergola and the old garden house - not far, just far enough so that if her father returned he would probably not find us immediately. There was an old tool shed with a tap at one wall. I laid my jacket for her to sit on, then cleaned a saucer and filled it with water for her . I called Officer Klein on my cell phone, and spoke quietly as I could.

She's not dead, she's here with me. At the back of the orchard. You need to come find us, get her away. Her father will come back, I think he needs to be arrested. And there's the certificate - it's wrong. Did you know it was wrong? You must bring it, so that we can correct it.