More. She was at the train station. I exist. The thought stood alone. The thought was alone and the sky was blue and there were people waiting on the platform. It was too big a truth to hold. She tried, instinctively, to move her hands around it, to turn it into prose, to write and therefore own and re-present it. It refused to yield. Her soul felt raw and exposed. The train came in. If she had been encouraged by the correct symbols, were the environment so arranged, then in that moment Joscelyn may have found God.
- - -
At seventeen, this: I can only accept that I am alone if I pretend I am saying it to somebody else.
- - -
Agnes left and for a while Joscelyn stayed in Bath. She got drunk, took the flimsy blade from a throwaway razor and pressed it against her tongue. She saw herself in the mirror, a string of bloody saliva down her chin. Her writing became arid, defensive and hostile. And then she burned everything.
- - -
She sang in a cafe. She was nineteen. A boy, a friend, passed her a napkin. He had written on it: And it is there that I would want to meet you. There beyond where there is no speech. Lawrence, she said. He smiled. They were young. Forgive it. They got on trains. They walked around an aviation museum on the south coast. Joscelyn and the boy looked at the log-books. Sorties. Who went up. Who came down. Arundel Cathedral. Battle. A coronation chicken sandwich in a porta-cabin café. She started to feel human and then she started to feel distinctly English. They stayed in a caravan. He said, You're perfect to me. She wanted to tell him the truth. She wanted to tell him what was in her heart: You're wrong. Where did she learn that?

- - -
She walked over the grass while he slept in the van. She walked carefully, barefoot, the lawn silvered. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke skyward, the clouds stained pearlescent. A shooting star. Her heartbeat marked its passing. I can only accept that I am alone if I language the realisation and hold it out to you as prose. Like love, writing is a kind of cowardice. She went back to the caravan dripping divinity. She was herself. She decided, mutely, to keep it that way.
- - -
A music channel played on the TV. The song changed. You started singing along very quietly. I didn't want or expect anything from you. I was flooded with gratitude. I was in the presence of love. It was in mine.
- - -
The man who said that reads it back to himself fifteen years later. Joscelyn lives in St. Petersburg. She sends him a copy of the book in which his declaration appears. He takes it as an unpardonable insult.
- - -
An axe swings into the frame. Some red goes up the wall. The man stands at the top of the stairs. He is holding an axe. There is red on his shirt. Joscelyn was eighteen. She was renting a room from a Lebanese woman in Roehampton. Something had changed irremediably. Most films imitate the act. An impression of life. They engage with the lie on its own terms and the question becomes just this: How close to not being a lie can I make the lie seem? It is always a lie. Bresson's films don't imitate life. His models don't act. He undermines all tension. In this way, he gets close to showing the thing itself. Joscelyn wrote herself instructions. The instruction she wrote most often was: No psychology. She was waiting for grace to penetrate, to show itself in the gaps, the gaps most fiction and most film tries so hard to close, to fill with noise, with psychology, with characterisation. And etcetera.
- - -
She is promoted to producer. She gets a mortgage. She's thirty-three. She is in a restaurant behind St Paul's. She wants a family but he eats with his mouth open. That night, Jessica Chastain leans against a BMW with tinted windows. The guy playing her husband is conducting a risky real-estate deal with some Jewish gangsters. He comes out to the car. Jessica Chastain is wearing a beige Mac. She's smoking a cigarette. It's a cold bright day in upstate New York. He needs her signature. We realise she is the boss. Joscelyn pauses the movie. That evening's date becomes irrelevant. She paces. She writes. The next day she buys a machete. She becomes dangerous in a thrilling new way. She paces. She listens to loud music. She swings the machete. She writes. There is something she cannot quite excavate. She is trying to dig out and discard the final, tight morsel of herself. But there it always is, the crouched remainder that just will not reconcile, no matter how aggressively she tries, no matter how bright and inspired her rearrangement of the formula. Remainder, Joscelyn.
- - -
She writes the screenplay in seventeen days, edits for three months then sells it with remarkable ease. A six-part drama about addiction and violence, about the savage mechanics of narrative. The plot is mercilessly tight, swift and consuming. In the face of it, her protagonists don't stand a chance.
- - -
She learns Russian in evening classes at Pushkin House. She is trying to force out the English but cannot learn a new language without an old one. She moves to Russia with the script money and eighteen months later her body is dragged from the Neva purple and bloated.
- - -
She eats in a German restaurant. A white rose in a tiny glass vase. The smell of the hot plate sticks to her clothes. She is woken by the quiet tinkle of a window broken with a cloth-bound fist. Her TV plays a Japanese game-show, muted. She sits up. The sheets smell sour with sweat. A footstep squeaks, slipping on the water she spilt by the dining table. She stands by the bedroom door. The man enters the bedroom, moves past her and opens her drawers. He flurries a leather-gloved hand across her things. He turns on the spot. He closes his fist over the top of his balaclava and removes it. A crackle of static. His eyes are pale blue. She says, What do you want, and he says her name, like this: Zhoz-la. It is talismanic. There is a pause. The moment is so brief, too brief to explain itself to itself, but the clarity, in the instant, is so pure that she will remember it as grace. The man leads her by the elbow. He touches her shoulder. She sits on the couch. It makes sense to Joscelyn that this is happening. The man takes a craft knife from his back pocket. Her knees liquefy but she makes herself stand. He gestures with the knife- sit. He slides a portion of the blade up with his thumb. She runs around the back of the couch, into the tiny kitchen area. She takes a knife from the wooden block. It quivers as she holds it out. She swipes the air with it. He moves. She fits the knife into his throat. It sinks in and he takes a step back and the blade extracts itself. A neat gout of blood arcs outwards and lands across the floor in a dull splatter. She backs up and then he is upon her. Seconds later her hands are lacerated, there is blood all over her forearms, she is on the floor. They are shoulder to shoulder. She looks at the ceiling. Nicotine and grease-stains folded into the off-white swirls. This why I came here, she thinks. And because this is what's happened, she is right.
- - -
English, she says. English. The man responds in Russian. He is saying the same thing. скажите мне, пожалуйста. Tell me, please. After a very long time she is given a cup of tepid water and a solicitor is led into the windowless room and shut in with her. The solicitor speaks English. There is a spot of shaving cream under his left ear. She touches her own ear. He mirrors her and looks at his fingertip. She looks at hers. There is blood there, enlightening the pattern on her skin. So she stares at the code of herself. Tell me what happened, he says. Am I under arrest? Of course. He says.
- - -
It is an equation. Said Joscelyn. I make a gesture, symbolic or actual. It is an attempt to re-establish a sense of emotional or spiritual balance. That is all stories are made of. The variations of X or Y are endless, but the formula remains consistent.
- - -
She is bailed pending trial. She is thirty-five. She is the author of two novels that do not exist in Russia. A TV show that was optioned, produced, aired and then archived. The man was given new blood but by then it was, apparently, too late. He is in a coma. She visits him. The British press causes some fuss and in this way she becomes famous, for a while. Her body is dragged from the river, bloated and purple, six weeks after her arrest. There is speculation. There are theories. The poplars move. There was a rabbit.