How else would I shunt loose my morning dump if I gave up smoking? Bowel-shaking is one quality of cigarettes that never appears in the surf ’n’ bronzed ads. I regret sleeping in my jeans, but I was afraid to undress in case I woke up to hear the door being jemmied and needed to bolt. I still am. This is worse than waiting for an earthquake. But what do I do if I think I hear an intruder? Hide? Where? I have no idea even how many floors this house has. I get up: first stop, toilet. Japanese-squat style, with a bowl of bitter herbs. A good clean birth – Western toilets increase the risk of complications. A Niagara Falls flush. The kitchen is terracotta and spotless – the owner loves cooking, judging from the flour-thumbed recipe books. Each cooking implement hangs on its own hook. Through the window I see an empty carport and a front garden. Roses, weeds and a bird table. A high privet hedge hides the house from the outside world. The cleaning cupboard is well stocked, but is too obvious to hide in. The living room is Japanese – tatami matting, a Buddhist altar with photographs of the recent and long dead, an alcove for flower arrangements, and a hanging scroll with kanji that would give me a headache if I tried to read them. There is no TV, no stereo and no telephone – just a receiver-less fax machine on the top of an ample bookshelf. The books are old, illustrated collections of tales. ‘The Moon Princess’, ‘Urashima Taro’, ‘Gon the Fox’. This house seems too orderly for kids. I open the curtains an inch. The back garden is somebody’s pride and joy. The pond is bigger than my grandmother’s – I can see carp lurking in the green. Late dragonflies skim over the duckweed. A stone lantern sits on an island. Pots of lavender, and a high bamboo grove, thick enough to hide in. Birds nest in an orange mailbox nailed to a silver birch. You could watch this garden for hours. It unfolds. No wonder there is no TV. I go upstairs. The carpet is snowy and lush under my bare feet. A lavish bathroom with seahorse taps. A master bedroom – the décor suggests a middle-aged couple. The smaller bedroom is only used for guests. Well. No hiding places here. You have to be nine years old to find good hiding places in the average house. Anju won by hiding in the washing machine one time. I assume my tour is complete, but notice a slatted cupboard door at the end of the landing. Its knob twizzles uselessly, but it swings open anyway. Its shelves are not shelves, but steep stairs. A knotted rope hangs down to help you haul yourself up. On the third step my head hits the ceiling, which shifts. I push, and a crack of daylight opens as the plyboard trapdoor swings up. I was way wrong. This is better than a hiding place. I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Paperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too. Light comes in through a high triangular window. A sort of wickerwork light shade hangs down. Apart from the bookcases and sagging shelves, the only item of furniture is an old-fashioned writing bureau with square holes to lose papers and bills in. My grandmother had the same sort. Still does, I guess. On the writing bureau are two piles of paper – one white and blank as starched shirts, the other a manuscript laid in a special lacquer tray. I cannot help myself. I sit down and begin reading page one.
Goatwriter worked all morning, trying to reconstruct the fragments of the truly untold tale which whispered before dawn, but it was as taxing as tracking tacks in a jonquil junkyard. Mrs Comb mangled wrangled sheets. Pithecanthropus returned the engine of the venerable coach. Goatwriter finally got up from his writing bureau to look up the correct spelling of zwitterion in his dictionary,