Someone else

In an earlier summer I found myself at a cafe in the Marais, with an American traveller who had also ended up in Paris that month. It might have been late morning. She’d had the place recommended to her, so she took me there. I hadn’t eaten anything for a few days, but in that moment I ordered an espresso, not a meal. I wanted to try a coffee for once, and it was the cheapest thing on the menu. It tasted as acrid as vomit, with a texture not much further off. Strangely now I’d give so much again for that awful taste, the bags under her eyes, the crumbs littering the table all over.

Instead I have a second-hand copy of King Lear. I found it this afternoon at a stall under the shadow of a bridge on Oxford Street. It belonged to someone called Katherine; judging by the notes that cover each page it was probably used for her A Levels, or earlier. There are many kinds of ink, and with each one she tracked a different theme – all marked off with a key on the inside cover. Red is madness, green is sight, blue is nature, and yellow stands for “ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ”. As you move through the book they creep in more and more, until each page is saturated with kaleidoscopes of notes, even verging into deep purple for sin, loyalty wrought in amber, and a washed out grey for endurance, and I feel in all their small ways the words, not the words even but the inks, tell a different story entirely, and one of far more various colours, if they could only be all gathered up into the cradle of a meaning.