Again yellow trees, a tangle of autumnal branches and leaves netting the window. At the pit of my stomach there is something scrabbling and squirming which does not go away when I close my eyes. I close them anyway and wonder what if what if what if, and breathe slowly and sleepily pretending superbly and not fooling myself, cocooned and wonderful and going nowhere, like sitting on the train. Later I’m in a cafe waiting for a supervision on a mediocre essay, and still the scrabbling crazy butterflies. Did I ever make your heart race? I remember a kiss and shaking legs. (Under three duvets day-dreaming with my sleepy in-and-out breathing roaring like the sea in my ears, I shiver uncontrollably.) As they scrabble and I think of this racing I come across the cat woman, now catlesss. I express my commiseration and her face crumples for the briefest of seconds. She points wordlessly at the cat tag on a silver chain around her neck. It happened in the basket, she says, and, in June, it was hard. I remember the dreams I had when Fritz ran away with Olive and never came back, waking up with my face pressed into a wet pillow over a cat with tattered ears, one snaggle tooth and almond eyes, a thing for cheese and a penchant for falling off furniture. In the supervision I don’t find the right words, but it doesn’t matter much because I mention desperately author anonimity and my lovely supervisor talks about Foucault until my time is up. Tonight is a play about robots and a tumbledry-warm laundry smell.
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