3

Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

But which parts are these exactly? And which readers? And what if these are the parts that prevail on a writer?

The haze in the beerhall.

The mutterings of drunks and crazy people.

The old jailbird’s song.

Tottered about the streets.

Collecting stories about the divided city.

Divided stories.

Might mean anything and nothing, allusive, blurred as the back of a piece of embroidery, a tangle of knots and threads.

Lingering on the wings beyond his hours.

Played dominoes with the prisoners in the evenings.

Gradually being drawn in.

What they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes.

The singularity of thievery.

Safe-breakers, cat-men.

Specialist who picked locks with his celluloid shirt collar.

The extraordinary calmness one feels at the moment of performing the theft.

Listens like a three years’ child.

Inhaled the odours of stone, of urine, bitterly tonic, the smells of rust and of lubricants, felt the presence of a current of urgency.

The strength necessary for departing from conventional morality.

Occurred to me that, if I wished, I could, at that moment, run out into the street, and, with vulgar expletives of lust, embrace any woman I chose; or shoot the first person I met.

Return to them in their vicious prison as one of themselves.

Hand over my shoelaces, belt, wallet.

Penal code’s all wrong.

Lists everything you mustn’t do in life, stealing, murdering, receiving stolen goods, but it doesn’t say a word about what you should do.

What remedy can there be.

Day melted into another.

Lived to himself in his little room.

Speaking only to order his food in the cafe where he sometimes takes his meals.

As one autumn cockcrow.

A kind of melancholy aspect about the morning that making him shiver.

Having neglected to bring a book or a prisoner’s writings to read, he reaches for a newspaper left on the table and turning the pages comes to a report of the inquest of the boy in the snow.

The same blurry mugshot.

Twenty-two years of age. Last known address a hostel in the east of the city. In breach of his licence.

Died from exposure.

No trace of alcohol or drugs in his blood.

No injuries except for some scratches on his lower limbs.

Not uncommon in the advanced stages of hypothermia for the sufferer to remove his clothes.

Paradoxical undressing.

Muscles directing energy to the vital organs fail, blood surges to the extremities, fooling the brain into thinking the body is hot.

Expect to find his garments and footwear when the snow melts.

Held the paper up to better light.

Looking for clues in the camera’s description.

Biographies in the line of a face.

Too young for the prison when it was taken, with all that suggests, but otherwise nothing to remark on.

Could look at him then look away and not remember what you’d seen.

Puts down the paper, turns back to his food.

Is not as if this fellar is his brother or cousin or even friend; he don’t know the man from Adam.