I'm on the top deck of a bus with a male friend. We're first year students (though I'm over 70) going to university. He tells me A is sitting behind us, a woman I've loved for forty years. I'm pleased: I can give her the book, White on Pictorial Space, I've brought with me as a present for her. I direct a ballet for her and my male friend. They are in their street clothes. I join them on stage making many decisive vertical and horizontal arm-movements. I explain to them my character is a wicked magician. They are unimpressed. [* John White. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. 1st ed. Faber & Faber. London, 1958.]

Later and somewhere else, a woman sings a new song she's written. Everyone loves the melody, but the words are not memorable. A man sings it in a cafe. 'They' threaten to shoot him in the fore-arm. The next day they do, with a bolt from a cross-bow that pins his arm to his chest. He bleeds out and dies.