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My memory is up to its tricks again, conflating separate occasions...

Certain of her outlandish claims retain for me even still a distinct tinge of authenticity at their core, even if the details were shaky. 'My trouble is,' she said one day, frowning, as if into dark inner distances, 'there is only half of me here.'..At last, though, I got it out of her: she was the survivor of a pair of twins...

I believed you, I believed you - how could you doubt it? Oh, my sweet cheat, I believed every bit of it.

She lied to me, of course, I know that, yet the things she told me (as distinct from the things that she did not) I think of not as lies but inventions, rather, improvisations, true fictions. The tales she spun had been breathed on and polished so often that the detailing had become blurred.

'Tell me things,' she would say, the tip of her sharp little nose turning pale with anticipation, 'tell me about your life.' I was evasive. It did not matter. She had enough fantasies for two...

She peered at me closely to see if I was joking and, deciding I was not, laughed.

...I felt for once, for one, rare, mutely ecstatic moment, at home in this so tender, impassive and always preoccupied world.

And here memory, that ingenious stage director, performs one of its impossible, magical scene-changes, splicing two different occasions with bland disregard for setting, props or costumes.

Extraordinary, this knack the mind has of holding things, however intimately connected, on entirely separate levels, like so many layers of molten silt.

...I know, I know the objections, I have read the treatises: there is no real she, only a set of signs, a series of appearances, a grid of relations between swarming particles; yet I insist on it: she was there at those times, it was she who clutched me to her and cried out, not a flickering simulacrum foisted on me by the stop-frame technique of a duplicitous reality. I had her.