At the trial I decided to represent myself. My testimonial ran as follows:

Over the course of the first year of their marriage, somewhere in the east, I’d gouged out her eyes with my trusted knife and I think the girl was psycho in the same fruitless manner a man might pathetically grope around for his recently plucked and discarded eyeballs I adjusted my trilby and spat my long-extinguished cigarette out onto the tarmac people like to tell me that having survived is something to be grateful for. I’m shy.

I felt sure that the only way I could convince the jury of my innocence was to demonstrate my timidity. Representing yourself might be mistaken for exceptional confidence, but I could not find a lawyer who believed the case could be won on these grounds.
There was no precedent, they said. Shyness is not a defense, they said.
Well, for a while this afternoon it looked as though I might proove them wrong. But then the prosecution produced a piece of evidence I hadn’t counted on ever seeing again. In fact, despite the fact that it was a document written in my hand, I had never actually seen it at all. It was dark. I have no idea what I said. I was 18.
The events described in the previous chapter took place exactly one year ago to the day. Indeed, my narrative seems to have skipped forward by exactly halving the time between the date on which I sent the original letter and today, the date of my trial. The fact that the important events in my life are so rhythmically placed, occurring with an absurdly mathematical tempo at intervals of increasing frequancy to bring me to this point can only mean one thing.
That one thing will surely be made clear tomorrow, during the summing up. And then I’ll have no choice but to tell you what happened.
What happened 8 years ago in Israel.
What happened 4 years ago in the Fenlands.
What happened 2 years ago at a concert of blind musicians.
What happened last year in a furtive marital home festooned with anacondas.
What happened 6 months ago when I got a letter from the East.
What happened 3 months later when we met.
What happend 6 weeks ago, when last I saw my first love.
What happened 3 weeks ago when I was arrested.
What happened last week. Or 3 and a half days ago when I started writing this down. And so on and so on until the drinks are served, god help me.
I’m shy, dammit. I’M SHY!

Over the course of the first year of their marriage, Dorothy Sevitz had learnt to adjust her expectations downwards. Every evening – the very second that dinner was cleared away and the dishwasher loaded – Adrian would hastily mumble his excuses (“It’s just for half an hour or so, darling; I’ll be straight back downstairs for Millionaire“) and scuttle upstairs to the study, where he would remain cloistered for the rest of the night.
Apparently, he was working on some sort of “online writing project” – although, prod him as she might, he remained frustratingly vague as to the details.
Sighing softly to herself, Dorothy would rise from the table, pausing only to re-tune Adrian’s mini-system from the ghastly, nerve-jangling din of XFM to the sonorous, palliative mellifluence of Classic FM. Clutching the remainder of the lukewarm Pinot Grigio (oh, for the Viognier-guzzling days of their courtship!), she would shuffle over to the distressed burgundy Linda Barker, where she would while away the last couple of hours before cocoa time, with only her prized collection of eminently strokable stuffed ruminants for company.
Most nights, she wouldn’t even wake to hear him slip into the bed beside her.
At the beginning, she tried her best to take a healthy interest.
“Darling, why don’t you bring some of your drafts downstairs? You know how I love it when you read to me.”
“Perhaps another night, darling. I’m still struggling to construct that uniquely identifiable authorial voice, you see. My attempts at hyperbole are a catastrophe of thermonuclear proportions, my alliterations are absolutely atrocious, and my similes suck like a toothless hooker, if you’ll pardon my French. Anyway, I’m shy.”
Frankly, Dorothy was beginning to have her suspicions.
One Saturday afternoon, with Adrian safely dispatched on an errand (that long-awaited baby vicuna was finally ready for collection from Stuff ‘N Stuff, two hours up the motorway in leafy Kidderminster), Dorothy invited her sister Shirley over for tea, cakes, and SSRI swapsies.
As the double-dropped blueys started to kick in nicely, Dorothy seized her moment.
“I say, Shirl dear – could you help set this silly girl’s mind at rest? It’s my Adrian, and all that time he spends on that blasted computer of his. Frankly, I’m beginning to have my suspicions. Do you think we could toddle upstairs and take a shuftie?”
“Course we can, Doro. I think a little rummage through a Certain Somebody’s Inbox might be in order; don’t you?”
“Ooh, Shirl! The Sisters didn’t call us the Naughty Newbolts for nothing, did they?”
Their giggling was to prove fatally short-lived.

Before I knew what had happened, I’d gouged out her eyes with my trusted knife and stuffed the sockets with little bits of mangled fox. Whilst this superfluous act of gristly decoration might not have helped my case later on when explaining it to the doctors, the initial violence was clearly self-defense.
You’d be forgiven for wondering how she then became my wife.
Two years later, on a date exactly half way between the incident at the garage and my trial (which takes place tomorrow) I met Dorothy McLaswell-Gorbicz again, playing banjo with a travelling band of blind musicians. The other musicians were Cynthia Marigold on the kettle drum and vocals, Claude Hiboux on double bass and a Jamaican by the name of Errol “Dud” Trabbet on the melodion. Since she was now sightless, and I had had the sense to introduce myself by another name, I proceeded to woo her over a series of seafood dinners at a little place I know.
The sense of power I felt was both delicious and shameful, and I would have confessed all to her, but I simply couldn’t find the words. I’m shy.

I this point I began to become suspicious. Something was up.
I think the girl was psycho. More psycho than girls in general are.
Was I safe? I didn’t think so.
All I had to go on was my SAS survival training, and a swiss army knife give to me by my Lieutenant back in the Gobi desert.

What was it that I found so beguilingly familiar about that Bowie-eyed woman? My mind searched my memory in the same fruitless manner a man might pathetically grope around for his recently plucked and discarded eyeballs.
As a logical and rational man, I know of course that love at first sight does not exist. Which makes it doubly strange that it has happened to me twice. I was drunk the first time. I thought perhaps someone had slipped something into my Pernod, because suddenly the colour on the world got turned down. Except around her. She seemed to be almost too colourful, in a way reminiscent of a black-and-white Western that’s been converted using the technically flawed but visually impressive four-strip Technicolor dye-imbibation process.
While I was no longer drunk (having learned not to drink on the job after a hilarious-in-retrospect confusing of a customer’s exhaust pipe and fuel inlet) I again felt myself experiencing that visceral, vision-effecting mesmerism. I knew nothing of this girl, didn’t know her opinion on anything, didn’t know how she would react to anything, didn’t know her history, didn’t know her future, didn’t know how prudent she was in sexual matters. All I knew was that no matter what the answer to those queries happened to be, I would adore them. Except now, I’d never know the answers.
I was struck by the efficiency of it all. Rather than have her destroy my love for her over the course of many torturous years, I could start getting over her now, mere seconds after having exchanged only thirteen words with her. I was rather pleased with myself.
Until the Volkswagen Passat came screaming back into the station, smoke flooding from beneath its hood, and the mangled remains of an almost-dead fox crammed into the spaces in its radiator grille.

I’d like to think of that as a sort of overture to my story. A dumb show, if you like. But there’s much more to it, and I think I’ll show my self to have been even dumber than this overture allows. I’m a very poor diarist, you see, and there is much that I don’t remember. That which I do, I’d rather forget. I don’t actually think that things were as bad I remember, just that I tend only to remember the dismal failures, the missed opportunities, and the causes for regret. People like to tell me that having survived is something to be grateful for.
People don’t know any better than me.
There is a choice to be made. One can begin at the end by relating the mortifying circumstances that arose as a result of having resumed my adolescent romance, or one can delve into the past and try to reconstruct the events that saw me transcribing lengthy tributes without a proper source of light.
I want to tell you both. I won’t. I’m shy.
No, I’m going to start in the middle. That way, I might start to remember enough of the beginning to weave a compelling story, and in time, it is even possible that I’ll find the nerve to tell you what happened as a result. I’m not promising anything though. Let me make that clear right from the beginning. Or rather, the middle.
Four years after I left Israel, I was working as a pump attendant at a garage in the Fenlands. Israel has a lot more in common with East Anglia than you’d think, but only because you wouldn’t really think about it. I mean, why would you? I was only thinking about it because almost half a decade before I had been falling in love on a Kibbutz, and now I was pumping diesel into a rusty Volkswagen Passat, which activity was liable to send anybody reeling into their pasts searching for some form of diversion. But I won’t allow the fact that I was thinking about Israel to trick me back to the start of the story. Beginnings of stories are wily like that. Embark on a middle without proper explication of the circumstances running up to it, and the beginning will try and force its way in.
I won’t let it.
The driver of the Volkswagen Passat in question had, at this point in the story, no connection whatsoever with Israel, or the girl. She would though, much later on. You see, there is a point to this middle. I didn’t just pick a random moment bang slap (and, indeed, slap bang) in the geographical centre of my story just for the sake of avoiding introductions and conclusions. The driver of the Volkswagen Passat was Dorothy “Banjo” Newbolt, born Dorothy McLaswell-Gorbicz, that is, my future wife (and not the subject of a letter I had written four years previously).
Are you still with me? Good. Good. Then I’ll go on.