Every night I look at me through your eyes.

That’s the way I’ve learned to do it, hiding from myself.

I’m me, but I’m Cameron Diaz, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Xena, making me your and my ultimate object of desire.

I imagine myself with inky hair, purple-black, wrapped around your throat – Scarlett and Rhett. I dreamed an equation, girl + boy = good, girl + girl = bad, being turned by simultaneous methods into girl + girl = good. Meanwhile, I tell myself I should really start imagining you, find something in you to lust after, something in myself to respond to your body, your eyes, the reality of you, and finding nothing, what a shock, fearful. Better go back to looking at me through your eyes.

Thank God for one more night for you.

I watched the woman who was no longer my friend Patricia but had become someone else, someone red-faced, eyes rolled back, hair dark with sweat painted to her skull.

She was reaching out, hands grasping and closing around nothing, but she stood unsupported, her feet planted. I tried to take her hand, but she shook it off, the momentary loss of concentration sending a flicker of annoyance over her face.

Flames drummed under a dozen gleaming steel pots. A chef in grey and black striped scrubs tipped out a pot through a funnel of steam. A deep purple octopus-like thing slid into a dish, tentacles with whitened suckers subsiding below the edges. The chef passed the pot impatiently to a minion and drizzled a deep burgundy sauce over the octopus, which sizzled. With a pair of tongs, he gathered up tendrils of purple cabbage and long bubbly leaves of dark green spinach and arranged them over the dish in quick flourishes.

He placed it on a clean white bench under a row of spotlights, turning it once, twice, and a waiter lifted it and was off through the swinging door into the dim, candle-lit restaurant.

Patricia groaned and slumped forward. The head chef held her by one shoulder. As she stared blankly forward, all he was interested in was completing the cut, as a junior chef gathered a grey loop of intestines to stop it reaching the floor. It seemed to be alive. He had a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and braced himself to keep it from arching its main sucker at him.

The head chef was cutting, with a foot-long, hand’s width gleaming knife, at the tuber where it connected to Patricia’s healthy pink tissue, extruding from a half-moon cut below her ribcage. A plastic suction tube carried out a stream of dark blood into a pan already simmering on the oven behind her. With a sneer of concentration, the head chef cut, separating pink from grey, deftly rotating his wrist without a touch to either side. The cut completed, the grey tuber fell into the under-chef’s lap, the head chef turned and walked away, grabbing a folded cloth from a pile to clean his knife, and two more attendants jumped forward to support and detach Patricia.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“The rioja brandy will wear off soon,” said a middle-aged, blonde chef with sweat running down her forehead from her long shift. She held a long knife down by her side. Three attendants stood behind her with tubes and bowls. “What’ll it be?”

I held up my hand. Along the side of my palm, under the skin, was a shiver of darkness.

“You’re sure?” she said, sizing me up. “I can see them in your spleen, shoulder and left aorta. Just ripe, they’d all be delicious, whatever you chose.”

“I mainly want vegetables this meal.”

“Okay, but you shouldn’t leave those much longer.”

“Next time,” I said, patting away my sweat. In the pan on the end of the row, a deep pink squid was trying to lift the lid, which was bolted to only open a couple of inches.

“Right,” said the chef. “Hold her.”

“Just the hand,” I reiterated. “Just the hand.”

Eva stepped out of her garden gate onto the beach with sand like cement. Blades of grass stuck up like zoomed-in hair follicles. Whales were out of waving distance.

The sky was peat and the problem she'd left on her desk, easily solved if she'd been halfway competent, braced her mouth into a smile.

This was a terrible place. You just walked and walked without anything changing, except that when you looked back, the gate was behind rocky walls and the idea of turning back was as exasperating as keeping going.

Why didn't she have a dog? She should have had a dog. She had on the wrong shoes.

She broke into the bank of seaweed that was choking the water back. Her foot crunched over a crust of tiny white seashells hidden in the stems, their perfect shapes coated in grains of grey sand. She reached down to touch them, straining for the relief of beauty, and got cold grit under old leaves.

A: John of Arieda -

B: His Majesty.

A: No, he forfeited that title.

B: We don't agree.

A: That's what this process is for. To decide whether he is a traitor or just terribly negligent.

B: We object to that framing.

A: We've taken ample note of that. Now the facts. Six days ago, John of Arieda, formerly King of Sileas and the Steppe, Grandee of the Church and Guardian of the Peace, passed a law without consulting his Cortes, already a treasonous act. No - quiet! You'll get your chance. His decree disbanded all radical factions of the army, and was therefore a declaration of war. It is proven that this was at the behest of Marco Demano, on whom sentence has already been passed. Nothing to say? Good.

His Ex-Majesty, after burning the constitution, rounded off his night by witnessing the execution of two heroes.

You're saying Demano didn't tell Arieda he was going to kill Una and Faruma? Hmm. What did he think was going to happen? Now we're getting to the negligence part.

What would I have done? If I was the king, and my general told me he had overthrown the Cortes and if I didn't want a civil war, I must legitimise his coup?

I wouldn't do what Arieda did, that's for sure. But to first acquiesce with Demano, then change my mind and try to persuade him to let Una and Faruma go? There's no evidence that happened, but let's say it did. And when it didn't work, wait for fourteen hours in my chamber, and when the traitors failed, try to escape by climbing over the garden wall, where I was arrested by the loyal soldiers retaking the palace?

This is no time for forgiveness. These acts are an outrage. The people have shown how strong they are. They deserve more than a weak king.

No, there is no evidence he invited Demano into the palace. So what? He might not have wanted to be seen as a traitor. That doesn't mean he isn't one.

Oh, you're giving him some credit for barricading himself in his bedroom with the queen? What a hero. Well, perhaps that action did sap the enemy's morale at a crucial moment. But that was too late for Una and Faruma, and all the others who lost their lives.

And why sign that law? What was going through his mind? What does he truly believe in? From start to finish, the aim of every clear, positive act he committed was to save his skin.

B: Not true. He didn't give in to Demano. And he refused exile.

A: He seems to have found some integrity at precisely the wrong moment, as usual.