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‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water, and hesitates She says, ‘Maybe: the sea was like badly-spread icing’   ‘Really? Christ,’ he says ‘Come on’   ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Her face seems hurt ‘For a start,’ he says with a seriousness she takes to be comic, though sometimes it’s hard to tell, ‘don’t begin with a simile Absolute first rule: never begin with a simile Similes deepen our understanding, they don’t bring things into being You can’t deepen an understanding of what’s not there You can’t deepen nothing’ Her eyebrows rise ‘I’m not sure about that Second?’ ‘Well, look,’ he says, ‘I don’t think the past tense is right We’re not erecting some kitsch Victorian pavilion, are we?’ ‘Aren’t we?’ ‘This isn’t some bourgeois chronicle of social betterment, is it?’ ‘Isn’t it?’ ‘This is more of a –’ what’s a good word? – ‘politically immediate piece about the construction of a people’s imaginative world and the, the limits of individual sympathy, isn’t it?’ ‘Is it?’ ‘What gets left out of the picture’ ‘If you say so’ ‘So the present tense is surely more appropriate’ ‘You said it’ ‘The past tense says tradition, convention, conservatism’ ‘Ok’ ‘But we want to announce, with the first sentence, that we’re fucking about with form’ She blows air through her closed mouth ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘but I missed the bit where we said that you get to decide what the story is I thought we were collaborating I thought the joy of collaboration was that, you know, tossed about on a metaphorical sea of intersubjectivity or whatever, you don’t know where you’re going to end up You relinquish your individual agencies, remake yourselves inside each other’ (A good moment to bring up the subject of having kids? Probably not, tbh) ‘So let’s try a little harder to remove ourselves from a rigid, patriarchal understanding of authorship, huh?’ To which he says, ‘Sounds like someone’s trying to universalise her own systems here, sounds a little like someone’s trying to drag me into her