I was very wrong.

The homme de lettres – Damian Barr – who organises the Salon, insisted that the audience be made up of members and non-members alike, it is his eccentric and egalitarian taste that defines the literary bent of the evenings, it is he who negotiated with a City law firm to stump up for free pizzas and drinks for the guests. There was nothing snobbish, or sneering or exclusive about it: just a large crowd of people who love reading getting together to talk about it.

It was a magnificent evening. The room was packed: there were queues down Bethnal Green Road outside. I spoke between Clare Wigfall, who read a poignant and rather lovely short story, and the extraordinary Diana Athill, who at 92 was as sharp as a button. We talked afterwards about how, many years ago, she had introduced my grandfather to the work of Henry Green, and how he had pressed Loving on me with the same enthusiasm. I asked Damian at the dinner table how he expected to make money out of the project (a sign that you can take a boy out of the City…) “I don’t,” he replied, grinning, “I just love putting on the salons”. Maybe this is a true sign of our times: the death of the profit motive, the opening up of previously hermetic institutions, an example – perhaps – of the evenings of poetry that Marx foretold once capitalism fell.

Whatever it is, Shoreditch House Literary Salon is a thing to be treasured.

As I was writing, I kept thinking that there was something I was missing. Someone else employed this very trick, and could be brought into the essay to support the argument. It was only after I had submitted the piece, and was reading Julia Donaldson’s Stick Man to my little boy, bath-squeaky and pyjama-clad on my knee, that I realised it was from a certain type of children’s book. Because of course repetition is a key facet of myth, and our children’s stories have the most direct relationship with the structures of myth. In Stick Man, as in The Odyssey, we have a hero who must go through a series of tribulations on a long and dangerous voyage before being reunited with his family in his tree-Ithaca. The repetitious nature of these trials builds to a crescendo as the text compresses into single-frame signifiers – from the dog who chases him to the swan who uses him to line her nest we move to a tableau of indignities until Stick Man lies, spent and Christ-like prostrate, in the snow. From the repeated refrain – “I’m not an arm! Can nobody see, / I’m Stick Man, I’m Stick Man, I’m Stick Man, that’s me!” – we suddenly move towards a moment of high lyricism when is seems that all is lost: “Stick Man is lonely, Stick Man is lost. / Stick Man is frozen and covered in frost… He can’t hear the bells, or the sweet-singing choir…”

Similarly in Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea (there’s a wonderful interview with her here) we find the bulk of the story in the repetition of the tiger eating “all the cake” and “all the milk in the milk jug and all the tea in the tea pot”. Only at the end of the tale, when Sophie’s father has appeared and the tiger’s occupation has been lifted, do we come again to a deeply lyrical scene. “So they went out in the dark, and all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a café.” Here the artwork underlines the effect of the language, with the low full moon hanging above the street lamps and and the shop lights illuminating the happy family scene. An orange and black-striped cat appears behind them as a reminder of the return to normality – it is anything but the suave and threatening tiger of earlier in the book.

In one of our favourites, No Matter What by Debi Gliori, the baby kangaroo – Small – asks his non-gender specific parent Large whether he/she would love him under a variety of Kafkaesque transformations (into a bug, bear or crocodile). The answer is repeated each time “I’ll always love you, no matter what”. At the end of the book Small asks “But what about when we’re dead and gone? Would you still love me? Does love go on?” In a gloriously touching scene, with curtains billowing out onto a Van Gogh sky, we find again a moment of lyricsim that interrupts, and is heightened by, the preceding repetition: “Large held small snug as they looked out at the night, at the moon in the dark and the stars shining bright. ‘Small, look at the stars – how they shine and glow, but some of those stars died a long time ago.’”

Whenever my little boy watches The Snowman, with its brilliant David Bowie cameo, he repeats again and again the word “sad”. The lyricism of these children’s stories does have something elegiac about it. The final scene of Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is a good example. It’s a picture of the bear walking lonely by the shore in the light of a full moon and prompts a “poor bear” from my boy who had previously gnawed his knuckles watching the family scamper away from the terrifying beast. But again a scene of (this time purely visual) beauty in a story that draws upon the repetition of a series of trials (which in Deleuze’s terms are “clothed” rather than “naked” repetition).  The formal technique whereby repetition is interrupted by lyrical beauty does teach us something about life – how beauty is often heartbreaking, how the world is largely mundane but illuminated by snatched moments of wonder which burn brighter for their briefness. We must savour these moments as we rip them from the dull surrounds of quotidian repetition, hold them close to us as we age, as Bowie/James holds his snowman scarf.

I instantly felt the sweep of those fields, the way that the sun would luxuriate over them in its setting, allowing the stubble to turn the same umber as the buildings before finally allowing night with its lazy bats to fall with a thump. My grandparents lived in the shadow of the tower in the distance and I used to visit them almost every holiday. Seven or eight years old I would wander through the empty rooms of the long L-shaped house, imagining myself a Renaissance Prince, a Romantic dandy, a second world war soldier on the run. Or I’d curl up on the swing chair in the garden and read – PG Wodehouse, Enid Blyton, Stephen King… I devoured books on that fusty cushioned chair with its dog hairs and creaking. And in the way that the mind sometimes brings these things back to us, I feel myself in that chair sometimes now when I’m lost in a book, when I am truly given up to the pleasure of reading. I was on the Tube the other day reading Georges Perec’s Life – A User’s Manual and I suddenly found myself sitting on that chair again, and the creaking of the train was the squeaking of the rusty swing.

I remember one morning waking very early in Italy. It was my last day of holiday and my aunt would be driving me to the airport the next morning. I walked out into the fresh morning air, down the steps and into the orchard. There, pecking and preening at the foot of an olive tree, were three hoopoes.

I sat and watched as they kicked at the dusty ground, rising and lowering their extraordinary crests. I was very young, but I remember thinking: “I will miss this”. And it is very rare that even as adults we are aware enough of our good times to really savour them, to hold our world carefully in our minds to protect it from the degradation of fading memory. So I stood there until the morning woke around me, and I felt the nostalgia building even as the hoopoes rose into the thickening air.

Years later I was walking down New College Lane after finals, having wasted my time at Oxford utterly, made a mess of my exams and frittered away the extraordinary opportunities that had landed in my lap there. And the same feeling came to me. I imagined myself into the London future that awaited me, and how I would look back on the boy who walked down New College Lane and envy him his youth and the luxury of his melancholy. And, as I turned under the Bridge of Sighs, I imagined I saw three hoopoes scratching on the cobbles of Radcliffe Square.

“Alex Preston… is to be commended for offering us This Bleeding City, a novel that tells us a few warm emotional truths behind a cold news story, the human tale of how it can all go wrong… The angry rants to be found in recent works that deal with the financial crisis (such as… Ben Elton’s Meltdown and… Sebastian Faulks’s A Week In December) don’t tell the human story anywhere near as well as Preston does… The book… is enjoyable and worth reading for the narrative drive. Preston’s style is both spare and rich, brutal and deft. He conjures exquisitely desolated cityscapes, populated by hollowed-out citizens who feel like they’re escapees from an Edward Hopper painting. May he continue to shine a light on the giant, scary engine that is modern capitalism.” Martin Baker, Financial Times

“For those of us who don’t know our derivatives from our sub-primes, Preston’s rendering of the arcane world of high finance makes gripping reading, and affords disturbing insights into the way in which the market is driven by greed, ego and an excess of adrenalin… This novel is a fascinating portrayal of a generation of bright young things who believed they could put their consciences on hold, get rich quick and retire at the age of thirty-five to resume fulfilling creative lives. We know how this fantasy ends.” Lindy Burleigh, Literary Review

“Preston’s debut novel could inaugurate a whole genre dedicated to fiscal calamity… It is a tribute to Preston that he manages to pull off the considerable feat of arousing sympathy for Charlie… Preston’s style often impresses. Striking metaphors and acute observations are strewn through his pages… This is a novel of admirable ambition.” Peter Carty, Independent

“Alex Preston, a 30 year-old year old trader and Oxford English graduate, has pulled off something undeniably magnetic with his first novel… It is intensely gripping – even upsetting – from the first, and if you still have the stomach for a tale about the despair that materialism can bring, then you will lap this novel up.” Zoe Strumpel, City A.M.

“10 Must-Reads This Summer: Written by a 30-year-old London hedge fund manager, this is a love story and a moral tale — a story of materialism gone mad. It… is gripping and moving from the very first page.” Business Standard (India)

“Preston[‘s]… evocation of the panic and false rationalizations that engulf those in the middle of a plummeting market is convincing… For Preston’s characters, the suspense of morality, of doing the right thing, is of a piece with the suspense of reason. The rather frightening lesson of This Bleeding City is not that ruthless men and women gambled away more than a decade of prosperity in full knowledge of what they were doing. It is that they had no idea what they were doing.” Times Literary Supplement

‘A beautifully nuanced, sensitively described story … challenging, frightening, heartbreaking and brilliantly gripping – a fantastic novel from start to finish.’ -  Easy Living

“One of the most moving books I have read… This Bleeding City stands out from other credit crunch books.” Caroline Scott, The Daily Gloss

“Learning about the world of high finance and its misogynist inhabitants was fascinating… [Preston] should be applauded for bringing to life a world that is generally only written about in terms of catastrophic but dry figures in news stories.” Rowena Macdonald, The Spectator

‘He writes beautifully with an effortless poetry evocative of London’s infinite sprawl … the narrative is compelling, tracing his complicated relationship with his best friends.’ -  Andrzej Lukowski, Metro

‘‘… the great unavoidable fact about this debut novel of the recent financial meltdown is that it’s written by a real insider … [this fact] gives it a rare golden ticket quality … long on heart and short on American Psycho-style satire, and has a brilliant, surprisingly horrible 1984-ish ending.’’ -  Dazed and Confused

“It is in recording the undoing of the City and the ravages of the first major crash in years that Preston shines.” Anjali Joseph, New Statesman

‘‘For fresh interpretations of the hedonistic inferno of the City, look out for Alex Preston’s debut novel This Bleeding City, a lurid, timely story about what happens to love in the morality-free zone of the Square Mile.’’ -  Elle

‘I never properly understood how the financial system collapsed until I read this compelling work.’ -  James Mullinger, GQ.com

‘…if one more person recommends Alex Preston’s This Bleeding City to me I’ll start to sniff a Senate-style conspiracy’ -  Mariella Frostrup, Psychologies

‘The novel’s love stories take several wrenching twists, drawing the reader into genuinely moving moments … the novel’s honesty about youth is valid … as is its exposure of a failed ideology … let’s keep an eye on this lad.’ -  Danny Denton, Irish Examiner

“Preston makes the economics accessible, twinning material excess with extravagant prose… the novel’s real femme fatale, however, is the world of finance, with its high-octane thrills and whispered promises of riches.” Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail

“The book… takes you into the heart of the madly-oscillating financial markets and into the minds and emotions of those who were involved with it. This Bleeding City is a human story full of pathos, with striking emotions and sharp observations about hopeless lives horribly skewed towards blatant materialism.” Navin Ignatius, Outlook India

“Preston has an undoubted storyteller’s instinct; This Bleeding City is consistently engaging and zips along at a decent crack.” Patrick Neate, The Guardian

“The book wipes clear a steamy window into a small, panicked investment bank as all the tickers in London City turn red.” Markham Nolan, Sunday Business Post

“Preston turns out to be a compelling storyteller: I was hooked right from the prologue and the pace kept up throughout. This Bleeding City is spot-on in its characterisation of a generation barred from self-fulfilment by its own materialism, as well as being an addictive read.” Lucy Chatburn, Bookmunch

“This excellent debut novel… goes far beyond the confines of the thriller genre, emerging as a work of complex, well-drawn characters and real emotional power… An unflinching depiction of the reality of life in the City and the dreams and nightmares that it can bring.”  Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

“The greatest feat debut novelist Alex Preston pulls is convincing us of Charlie’s vulnerability, making him more sympathetic than we’d ever give the average city boy credit for. This is a debut novel of promise, edgy and tense, sealing up a specific moment in our capital’s history up perfectly in a time capsule.” Booktrust

My wife was her usual calm, magnificent self, moving around like some benevolent spirit making sure that people were enjoying themselves. But she did disappear regularly to the loos in the bookshop’s basement and, in the taxi on the way home, when she suggested that we make a detour via the hospital I wasn’t entirely surprised.

I had forgotten how wonderful it is to hold someone so tiny. How each gurgle and sigh sounds monumental. And now there are four of us it really feels like a family. Times like now are when I read articles by the smug childless like this and shudder. Mr Baggini wishes to “rise above the biological imperative to reproduce”. And there was a dreadful interview with the 50 year-old Irvine Welsh where he talked of coming in drunk at four a.m. and how he wouldn’t be able to do this if he had kids. I can only respond thus:

It doesn’t get better than this. I mean it can’t can it?

My wife and I have been living through dark days. Not any worse than those lived through by a hundred thousand others, no darker than the kind of days that are just part of life for many, perhaps for most. But it has been hard for us, has been something lying upon our shoulders, a weight that sometimes threatened to crush, to push the air from our chests. There were problems with the baby, problems that started five months into the pregnancy. As we teetered on the apex of time when words like “viability” and “compromised” are used, we spent long, dead hours in the hospital. We tried to read the flickers of emotion on the faces of consultants, looked for worrying hands, attempted to decipher the shifting sand pictures of the scanners.

One night, perhaps the worst, I said a prayer. It was a bashful, self-conscious prayer, and somehow I had conflated the faces of the God I was addressing and my old headmaster, but I begged that the little one might make it through. That he or she would be given a chance to survive. That I might hold him one day, clasp her to my chest and screech Joanna Newsom songs until she slept as I had with my first son. My wife had taken to going to the bathroom on her own when things got bad and I was in the bedroom. It was four a.m. I stood at the window and pressed my face against the cold glass and I looked up, over the towers of the City, to a sky that was vast and unreadable.

I had always been a grudging adopter of Pascal’s wager. I was happy to believe in a general and non-committal way in a benign God who held himself aloof from the affairs of man, as long as it didn’t stop me from doing exactly what I wanted. It always seemed to me that the belligerent atheism of Dawkins and his pit-bull allies was every bit as wrong-headed as the fundamentalists whose loony beliefs he mocked. Living through a period of personal grief hasn’t made a true believer of me yet, but it has encouraged me to adopt a constructive agnosticism, a willingness to ask the right questions, to read the right books. It seems like the least we should do, to give ourselves a chance, just in case. It’s a weak position, I guess, but it’s stronger than anywhere I was before.

As I said my prayer that night, wet palms pressed closely together, I promised I’d write this blog if everything worked out. We’re not there yet, but things are looking up. Four weeks to go until the birth and the scans seem normal now. The NHS has been extraordinary, the doctors wonderful, my wife majestic. But I can’t help think that someone else had a hand in this. And I will spend the rest of my life trying to work out if I’m just giving in to that atavistic impulse Freud talks about – the need to believe – or whether, perhaps, there’s more to it.

The Odyssey – Book Nine

I sat in a hotel bar in Cleveland trying to make my beer last another hour. I watched from the long window as drunks pushed their shopping carts bundled with the festering tragedy of their lives up and down as they waited for death or a bed at the Y. Behind them rose the slag heaps that were the useless memory of a time when this city meant something. Across the lobby a tanned collection of tourists who’d been at the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. They wore domed Beatles wigs and their jackets were studded with stickers but their eyes were haunted. They had heard that Cleveland was a dive, but not this. Cleveland changes you. I don’t think you can ever be really optimistic again once you have been to Cleveland.

There was a boat to Buffalo leaving at nine that evening. A drunk named Rocky on the Greyhound from Little Rock told me that you could jump aboard from the shore if you timed it right. That plenty of guys did it, and then it was six hours up the coast to the docks in West Seneca. From Buffalo I’d hitch the I90 to Seneca Falls and then down the Cayuga – which I’d walk if I had to – to Ithaca. Where Penelope was waiting. It wasn’t the triumphant return I had hoped for. But I had only lost half a semester. And the dean said I could make up the classes I had missed and Penelope would help me. She would sit with her long patient fingers turning over pages and talking me through the passages of Homer and Virgil, Pliny and Ovid.

Someone clapped a hand down on my shoulder and spun me around in my chair. Two large, smiling figures stood there. The taller of the two leant towards me and spoke in a voice deep and beery.

“Odysseus, I thought it was you, man. What the fuck are you doing here? Let me get you a beer. This is crazy.”

I sputtered laughter, threw my arms around his shoulders and then hugged the man next to him.

“Polites, Eurylochus, this is amazing. No I’ll get the beers. I’m almost down to my last dime but this requires celebration. Why are you here?”

We moved to sit at a table in the lobby under a many-lamped golden chandelier. Polites, who studied classics with me at Cornell, and was wide receiver for the football team, spoke again, tripping over himself in his haste to get his words out.

“Eurolychus and I were just bored yesterday morning. Saturday in Ithaca with nothing to do and we knew there was a Browns game on last night and we decided to head down here and catch it. We hooked up with some girls afterwards and went to the bars down by the waterfront. We haven’t been to bed yet.”

Eurolychus was smaller and wider than his friend. A dark brush of stubble covered his face and he laughed for no reason then looked down at the table, spinning his beer mat.

“We did some pretty crazy drugs. I think I’m still tripping. I’m not exactly sure, but I think I am.” His voice was slow and Southern. He seemed like an amiable, fucked Sothern bear.

We walked out into the dank late afternoon and I remembered the boat and my friends decided they’d come with me. We walked down to the docks with blue cigarette smoke streaming out behind us like scarves. The light faded around us as we made our way down the hill. Crows were circling the trees in Voinovich Park, black against the remnants of the day’s light.

The boat was smaller than I had expected, loaded high with crates of what looked like turnips or Swedes, some sort of root vegetable. There was a chain link barrier along the dockside and a snarling stevedore who paced up and down beside it. We stood further down the quayside smoking and clapping our shoulders against the cold. When the ship’s engine roared to life and its bell rang we had to sprint along the dock to catch it. The stevedore was gone and we threw ourselves over the chain fence and onto the crates of vegetables. We sat and talked as the boat chugged out into open water, past the slag heaps and piles of garbage that sloped down to the shore.

“Where have you been, Odysseus? We’ve missed you. I haven’t seen you all this term.” Polites passed me a cigarette and lit it, cupping the flame with his large hand.

“I tried to make it in Hollywood – I mean it was really stupid of me – but my brother got me a walk-on part in a film. A film with Brad Pitt. It was called Troy and I guess my brother thought I’d be good for it because of my studies. I’d bring some authenticity to the part or whatever. My brother’s a producer at Warners and he was trying to look out for me. But the second night I was there I got drunk and got into a fight with this prick English actor called Orlando Bloom. You know him? And so they packed me off with no money, my brother all ashamed of me and I got the greyhound as far as Cleveland, and then I met you guys.”

“And we’re gonna take you back where you belong,” Eurolychus said, smiling. “Back to that damn fine woman and the leafy boulevards of Ithaca.”

The storm came upon us quickly, sending shaggy peaks of waves against the side of the little boat, soaking us and slapping down upon the crates. At first it was exhilarating. We were wrapped up in our winter clothes and to be there amongst the vast, chaotic howl of nature was thrilling. Then the waves built up, and the wind screeched more strongly and I began to feel scared. We fastened ourselves to the metal bar that ran along the side of the deck. I tied my belt loop around it and gripped on with my freezing fingers. Polites helped Eurolychus over to the edge and they clung to me. I saw the stevedore lashing boxes together. He caught sight of us, threw up his hands and disappeared. Each plunge downwards seemed like a descent into hell, every struggle up a wave’s steep incline merely foretold the plummet to come. Finally rocks reared up and there was a crash and a splintering and a roaring and I was sure that it was the sound of the end.

When the golden locks of dawn dropped down from the heavens the next morning I found myself lying with my head on a pile of turnips. Polites was shivering above a fire that sputtered and hissed further up the beach whilst Eurolychus collected driftwood along the shoreline to feed the black-smoking pyre. I found that Eurolychus’ sheepskin was laid over me like a rug and I stretched myself out under the damp, heavy mass. The dawn seemed ashamed of last night’s histrionics and broke with a reserved forlorn beauty, warming us with its timid forays before the lake’s sharp wind chilled us again. After a while it was clear that the fire wasn’t going to take, and we decided to head inland to find somewhere to get dry.

We made our way slowly over the dirty dunes with their shaggy grass tufts and looked down upon a small town. It was a grey town, even in the sunlight. Something dispiriting hung over the place, a thin veil of mist that crept up from the river, but also something tired and hopeless in the way the houses leant against each other, the uniformity of the driveways and broken picket fences and chained, silent dogs. There was one larger house directly in front of us whose high windows reflected the waters of the lake, the vast sky. A low wall encircled the place – it was almost a mansion – and willow and privet and thorny acacias spewed over this wall, as if they were trying to tug it down. We came down the slope of the dunes and pushed open rust-red gates.

Sand had blown along the pathway and lay in strata-lines against the front door. Vegetation was everywhere, swollen by the damp and the rain. I saw lianas twisting their way into broken windows, vines and ivy battling to pull out crumbling brickwork.

“Do you think there’s anyone here? Maybe we can go in and get warm.” Polites’ voice was very loud and quivered slightly. “There might even be some old dude inside with a phone we can use.”

I pushed against the door. With a low creak it opened. Darkness. Then as my eyes adjusted, and we made our way in, we saw that we were in a huge hallway. The ceiling went up to the beams of the roof, but very little light came in because of the plants blocking the windows. It was like a cave in there. But it was warm. And in the corner of the room we found wood for a fire, a box of matches, and a half-drunk bottle of whiskey. Exhausted, barely waiting for the fire to take, we choked down the warming liquid and fell into a deep sleep.

“What the fuck you doing here? Who the fuck are you?”

I woke to find some kind of monster standing over me. He must have been seven feet tall, his arms held above his head and a huge axe whirring round, cutting the air. He wore a tweed jacket and moleskin trousers, a white shirt and bow tie, but on his head, with one glowing yellow panel in the front, sat a brass diver’s helmet. His voice was high and plangent. He raised the axe up and brought it down on Eurolychus’ head. There was no shattering of bone, no gory explosion of blood. Just a wet sound, like someone dropping an ice-cream. Polites was cowering in the corner, whimpering, sniveling. The monster put a foot on Eurolychus’ shoulder and pulled the axe out. My friend slumped forward and I could see the stunned look on his face, as if in death he was thinking “But I’m at Cornell. This doesn’t happen to people from Cornell.”

I edged backwards towards the fire as the creature came towards me. My hands were scrabbling on the dusty floor, my fingernails clacking like rats claws. There was no way out. I turned to look into the roaring flames. The poker. In our tiredness we had left the poker in the fire. As the monster closed over me, a moan of pleasure coming from his throat, I took the poker in my right hand. The creature lifted the axe above his head and began to roar. I plunged the poker with its end wand-white hot, into the yellow glass of the diving helmet. The monster’s roar changed in timbre, elongated and intensified. Clasping his hands to his face he staggered backwards.

It was only then that I noticed the girls. Near the door, hanging back, glowing even in the darkness, were perhaps twenty young girls. The monster fell amongst them and they looked into the blood-dimmed light of his helmet and made soft, soothing noises. One of the girls took up the hem of her long white dress and mopped at the blood. They were all in their teens, blonde, delicate in the dim light. I helped Polites to his feet and spoke.

“Let us out. You have killed my friend. I should kill you. But I won’t. Please, just let us past.”

I saw the creature swing round towards the direction of my voice. He pushed the girls away and, reaching into the pocket of his jacket, he pulled out a small lady’s pistol. Aiming it with unsteady hand, he fired, missing us by some way. Then he placed a chair in front of the door and sat down, resting his helmet-head against the frame behind him.

“You won’t leave here. You have blinded me, broken the glass that daddy made me to help me see. But you’ll die inside here. Or I’ll shoot you trying to escape. Nobody fucks with the son of Poseidon. Only my girls get out from here alive.” He reached over and stroked one of them. He tugged at her thick blonde hair, wound it in a coil around his fist and then let go. As the last frail tendrils of light disappeared from the room, the monster moved his chair forwards and let the girls out into the night.

“Go out and bring me money, my darlings. Make your Pretty Polly proud. You are so beautiful. Let me feel you.”

As each passed he ran his thick fingers through their hair, chuckling to himself.

“The intruders won’t escape. They don’t have your beautiful hair. They’ll never get out.”

The girls began to trickle back in after what must have been three or four hours. As each entered she dropped a pile of banknotes at his feet. He muttered to himself throughout. One of the girls brought him some more whiskey and he lolled back against the door. After a while I could hear him snoring. I crept over to the group of girls who were clustered in the corner, combing out their long hair, washing in turn at a small, battered sink.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

The nearest to me turned with angry eyes.

“Shhh… Don’t wake him. Please don’t wake him. This is the only time we have.”

“Why are you here? What is your name?”

“I am Lotis. These are my sisters. Our parents owed money to Poseidon. That’s Polyphemus’ father. He runs everything here. All along the shore from Cleveland to Buffalo people are terrified of him. The big boss. So instead of payment he took us, and he let his son take care of us. If we tried to escape he would kill our parents.” The girl began to sob. One of her sisters came and put her arm around her, the others gathered around and looked at me searchingly.

“I’m so sorry. I wish I could help you. But I do have a plan, though. A way you could help me. And then maybe I can come back and get you out of here.”

In the dim light we perched above the sink and cut the girls’ long hair. Some of them sobbed as we did it, some giggled at the tickle of the scissors. We only took a little from each one, and piled it on our own heads. Then we waited. Polyphemus prowled the hall the next day, sniffing the air within his brass hood, sometimes coming dangerously near to our hiding place on the still-warm embers of the dead fire. Then it was time for the girls to go out. Crouching down and pressing ourselves close against the girls either side of us, we shuffled towards the door. I could hear the monster wheezing as we approached, could smell the rancid breath that built up inside his mask. I had twined the girls’ hair as best I could into my own, but still some came loose when he ran his hand through my hair. Then we were out, and I breathed in the rich dark moistness of the air, saw the moon illuminating a still, clear night.

Polites tried to pull me away, tried to drag me after the girls who were scurrying like little white ghosts into the darkness, but I turned to face the house.

“Polyphemus. I’ll be back for you. My name is Odysseus. I’m going to come back here and finish what I started.”

The monster staggered out of the door, firing his little pistol haphazardly into the air. His voice, when it came, was soft, icy.

“My father said you would come. A man who would take my girls away. Come here. Let me shake the hand of the man who outwitted me. Come and have a drink with me.”

“Fuck you. You killed my friend and I don’t care who you father is. I just wish I could send the rest of you to hell to join your eyes.”

Polyphemus bellowed out to the sky.

“Daddy. Daddy come and help me. Daddy these men have hurt me. If you love me daddy, you’ll kill them for me.”

He sank to his knees. All was silent and then a powerful wind swept in from the lake, shaking the trees around us. Polites and I ran down to the beach and made our way along the shore until we found a fishing hut with a row boat moored beside it. Despite the white-tipped waves we pushed out into the lake. Polites rowed first and I stood to see the top of the house, outlined against the first fingers of rosy dawn, slowly fade from sight.

I was reading Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, waiting for my wife to come down from our room. The book had moved me, although its voice was very close to the adolescent poet I had strained so hard to escape. A couple sat further down the terrace sipping their coffees and, in the still air their words came to me. They were arguing, something banal and familiar, the sort of argument every couple has. They were in their late-thirties and American and didn’t think they were being overheard. Then the argument darkened, a cloud past over and I shivered.

“I saw her hand on your arm,” the woman said. “You didn’t move. How could you? He’s your best friend.” The man sat very still, looking at the windows of the flats opposite. After a while he rose and went inside. The woman started sobbing silently.

I opened the back of my book, borrowed a pencil from the waitress, and wrote this down. It still sounds adolescent, callow, forced, but perhaps that’s the fate of all but truly brilliant poetry.

At Dinner

It feels as if I knew her first

The way, at dinner, her fingers closed

Around my arm when we spoke of

Close, raw, magical things

Like the child growing inside her

And their future and our past.

It’s not as if I call him a friend now;

Friends fell away like leaves

During the autumn of my thirties.

Those that remain are relics

Held in place by the violence of their

First embrace, still trembling.

And so when her hand, soft,

Slightly damp, closes around my arm.

I imagine worlds of meaning in that touch.

]]> http://alexhmpreston.com/poetry/feed/ 0 http://alexhmpreston.com/africa/ http://alexhmpreston.com/africa/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:32:04 +0000 admin http://alexhmpreston.com/?p=176 I have a theory that we are all trapped at a certain age. That at a particular time in our lives things converge, our external and internal worlds reach a state of equilibrium and everything before and – crucially – after this seems reflected in the still water of that time. It is not that we stop growing, but rather that the rest of our lives are lived under the eye of the person who remains in that golden age, wondering how things went quite so wrong.

For my brother it was eight, for me seventeen. It’s not necessarily the time I was happiest – indeed I was still frothing with the unjustness of adolescence – but it was a time when the world seemed laid out before me, and I had done enough to know what was possible but there was still so much to achieve. I started to write my first novel that year (skin-crawlingly bad); I was in love with three girls at once; I read Crime and Punishment, Lolita and L’Etranger for the first time. And even now the seventeen year old me is watching the thirty-one year old me and laughing in the way I did back then, as if I knew everything and could afford to snigger that way, as I lit another Lucky Strike and turned up the Moby track playing from the open window of my battered Cinquecento.

For my father it was his late twenties spent in Africa, first in what was Southern Rhodesia (and is now Zimbabwe) and then, disenchanted with Ian Smith’s apartheid rule, in Zambia and Kenya. Something came over him when he talked about Africa, a nostalgic misting-up but also a sense that he was still partly there, under the great sun, sipping a gin and tonic on the porch of the Norfolk Hotel.

So it was natural that I should have a feeling for Africa, should sling a backpack over my shoulder in the summer of 1998 and set off to Kenya. And later, as I moved towards my own mid-twenties, I took every opportunity to visit Africa, searching perhaps for the person that my father left there, perhaps straining to find that man in myself. Whatever lay behind it I loved those wide skies and narrow streets, the slamming fist of the smells that hit me as I made my way down dirty passages to goat markets as the sun rose. Maybe I even left a bit of myself out there.

I haven’t been back for a while. Since the baby arrived I have spent my holidays closer to home, under skies less varied and upon streets of uniform tarmac. And as I hear of friends setting off for great adventures, and I see their photographs of helter-skelter skylines and impossible white beaches, something in me does mourn those days. But then I hitch the baby in his sling to my chest and set out across the countryside, and the little man chats away and giggles as I bound uphill, and the past seems like a very different country, one I’m happy to have left behind.