Section 1, 6

Zig-Zag was a cat with a sense of humour, you’ll notice if you see him. He picked it up from me in the portico because on dark nights I used to tell him jokes and I knew he was listening because if I stopped he would turn and look at me.

I made Fern McCaulay laugh. The second time we met, I handed her my adult learning request form and she squinted at it weirdly and then said, so, you’d like a course in, uh, handwriting?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it says hand wringing. I wring my hands a lot. I want a course on hand wringing. To help me stop.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that ascender certainly looks like a T to me. Are you sure? Because we don’t teach a handwringing course but we do offer a handwriting course – Calligraphy. I teach it at lunchtimes.’ ‘As well as the unicorns?’ ‘Yes. Listen why don’t you come to my next lunchtime lecture instead. It’s called how to look at cleavage. It’s fun, and full of practical exercises involving manikins and teaches men exactly how to sneak a peek at cleavage without upsetting a lady or embarrassing themselves.' ‘But I don’t need to know about that,’ I said.

‘Oh, I think you do, Charlie,’ she said

That’s how the Storey institute breathed me in off the street and it breathed me in again later that week. A big preview night called Bridges over the Lune. She in the green floaty dress again. We weren’t even supposed to be there. Her perfume, I could almost see it in the air, like smoke, curling round the painting of the bridges, smearing into the mist on the banks of the Lune, the haze of her, and the fog in my eyes, then later in the tasting garden…the taste…the taste. But we chatted that night, that’s all. Spoke together and looked up at the stars while from the window above the chatter of voices and clinking of glasses drifted down. Our voices grew softer and softer and slower and slower, and our heads moved closer as if we were magnetic, and I remember our hips touched. We learned everything about each other, everything that had happened since school. For the first time I realised It might be possible to love someone without reason, without logic, without shame. Fern McCaulay seemed to have climbed inside me and settled down to sleep like a cat.

But Fern was married to a lecturer and I was a lino man - a lino man who could write poetry. I put everything I felt about her into that poem, the words soared across the page, and a few weeks later I dropped it into the letterbox at the Storey and it seemed to fall for miles before I heard a soft pat as it hit the bottom.

Find Zig-Zag please, The children are crying.

THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING.

(In Fern’s blog she says I’m a like strange building with weird doors. I like that about Fern, the odd way her mind works. Have a look at what she says here.)