You and I standing at the end
You and I standing at the end of a country platform with three or four others. We have a picnic packed, including a bottle of white wine. You pull the bottle from the basket and ask me to get a corkscrew. I walk up the platform and have to get to the other platform. To do so I must walk through a train, from side to side. It is a troop train, full of damaged soldiers' bodies with missing limbs, wrapped in hessian, lying on straw. I feel sick but plunge through, wondering what detail I should tell you. We are staying in a hotel, that feels a little like the one we looked at in Nice, with the lift that didn't work. We are desperate for a bath or shower but can't find one. I look around, see a cubicle, but it has only a toilet, not even a basin. As I look at it, you are being told by the receptionist that there are no washing facilities and that if we love each other we won't need to wash. It'll be fun, she says. She shows us where the shower room was, levering up some hardboard so we can peep through to a shower room long boarded up. I wonder if we could crawl through and if the plumbing would work. We decide to beg a shower from another hotel. We are living in a house in the country. It is a wreck. The walls are bare lath and plaster. There is no heating, although it is winter. We have several children with us and some adults. I make fires in some rooms. On the top floor I light it in the middle of the floor. On the ground floor is a small coal fire in a big fireplace. My mum is there . I tell her it is a good fire. I return to the top floor to put some rubbish on the fire there but you have swept the fire up and thrown it out of the window, to tidy up. You say best to burn things in the garden. I go downstairs. In the garden you have filled a large brick-lined fireplace with water and are swimming. I join you and say I wish we had thought of this long ago. You look knowing.