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The only real person in this book is DJ Silver Fox – Roger – who was kind to us.

 

 

If this were a film, I would want it to start with leaves, and light coming through them. The sun would hit the camera straight on, and splinter out and catch dust. Light and leaves are how I’d want it to begin.

There would also be unmetalled roads and bright yellow butter on our table and the Coupée, thin as a spine. You’d see the sea, birds that flew faster, and women driving tractors, with potato cheeks, and legs cocked like cowboys. The Mermaid Tavern, with dogs in, and children. Roger with hips like a whisky flask, and fields through fences, school-jumper green. I’d put sun on all of this.

On our skin, too. Sun on our arms as we cycled along the Avenue, sun on Sofi, sun on Pip. I’d hold my hands up to the light and you’d see scars from sea anemones and other things.

The camera would pull out then, back past our skin, the stones, our bikes, the house and, eventually, you’d see that we were on an island. Then I’d go back to before I was on an island, and before I knew the island existed. I’d go back to the very beginning.

 

 

Thieves, bandits, pirates, robbers, ruffians and murderers, no worse than the very cannibal, they would certainly eat us alive.

Rabelais on the Sarkese, 1530