I’m not wondering, actually: there’s too much else to wonder at, or worry about, as she crosses the room to the bar. She is wearing a hat, that’s the first thing I’m unprepared for. I’ve been reading the new novel by Beryl Bainbridge

set on the Titanic during its maiden voyage.
It’s very well written, with some quite brilliant touches.It’s up for the Whitbread Prize, and I’m one of the judges.It’s not a huge book, but 219 pages in hardbacktake up precious space and weight in a back-packer’srucksack,so I’m wrapping it up in a sheet of plasticand leaving it here in the heart of the rain-forestlike something preserved in amber or aspicthousands of miles from where it was published.Maybe I’m hoping some American in the field ofarchaeologymight unearth it one day, and claim that ancient tribeswrote knowledgeably of future events,and henceforth all the operators of the human speciesare banned from the Amazon and all of its tributariesby some new-formed, well-armed global ministryfor fear of disrupting the course of history.Either that, or travellers in time from the year dotwill find and enjoy Every Man for Himselfwhether it goes on to win the Whitbread Prize or not.!From ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’, to be published by Faber & Faber in September. Like glass, concealed but not lost in light,

contains in its light a certain unseeable thickness,
I saw the half moon sitting in a tree at dawnlit with interior darkness.I saw the ground was gone and allalong that gloom the little glows of carsvanished away; a black unseeable birdintermittently blew the infinite song in its centre.I saw a woman in a shell;I saw two people lying stoney stillin the durable darkness of fleshmove their mouths as if to suck at darkness.And when I touched their mouths,I saw the outward closing in its inward eye,I saw the real unseeable sun in the sun, risein a region of shadow cut off from its own flames.. He realised that the love letter under the buttercoat was not so much for the woman now over his head like a tinned angel, but for the house that opened itself up to him at the tip of the glistening sealoch, wide-faced, entirely known, secret.This story will be included in Candia McWilliam’s new collection, ‘Change of Use’, to be published by Bloomsbury in October..

Animal feeds were an industry bursting with health just now, Gavin reflected.He was hungry and full of desire, made legitimate and therefore more lewd by the glimmer of the big house he could see now out the plane window, floodlit as he’d told young Lorne it should be for their arrival, although the Highland dark was saturated with light.As the plane came low over his candlelit steading, Lorne looked up at its modest size, pondered its concentrated value, reflected upon whom it held, by what it was kept airborne, expertise and physics and meat and money. In the boot of the aeroplane, it was really no more than a boot, were piles of cloth, silky pink and lime yellow, for their bedroom, where they planned to sleep tonight in the new- plastered room that should by now have dried out.It was a company plane. He interpreted this look in a way that satisfied them both.In the tiny plane like an egg whisk that was taking them back to spend their first full night as the owners of the refurbished Thornshields after the day in the city, Nora stretched, her wrists crossed and gold- burdened. He repeated his exciting if idiomatic question of the day’s beginning.”What’ll we buy the day?”"Poor man,” she said, finishing her last prune, and raising to him the look she saved up for such moments, when she knew what she wanted so much that she dared not say. Today she took her colour from the buttery caramel suit she wore, and the contrast with her rural fresh self of yesterday was like a gift of time to him from her Today she was a woman poised to spend. He caught a sizzling slice of Lorne sausage up on his spatula and ate it off the smoking metal keeping his lips away from his teeth.Something made Senga think of horses.”You look gorgeous,” said Gavin, finishing his breakfast with the rich sweet knob of eggy black pud he’d saved He changed it to a word she preferred “Delicious.”She looked up at him through her fringe. “Ken, felt, it’s formed out of all the cloth never made it into clothes, ground up and plastered together and rolled out smooth It’s meat felt, Lorne sausage Right enough Felt meat.”The Smirnoff had made him hungry.

The bloody zoo.” He was already on the second stage of his morning’s drinking, the confidence. He’d be tearful by the time the last reek of kippers had been and gone and they were back to salad and Parazone.Now she looked at the brick of plopped meats, she could make herself see the bits in it, bits of tiger, parrot, cow, pieces from the cage floor, the bits from between the teeth of grinders, old used- up animals and vigorous ones that had succumbed to stress in the modern world.”It’s like felt,” said Callum. Prettier.”His smile came through on the last word and gave the waitress the feeling here was a man loved women. She left the table writing on her wee pad and feeling she’d received a compliment.In the kitchen, she gave the order to Callum the griddle chef and watched him cut the slices off the Lorne sausage that was of special catering size, as long and thick as a stocking stuffed with remnants.”What meat is the Lorne, mainly?” Senga asked Callum, pretending to be retying her frilled pinafore while he took a nip out the vodka bottle he kept in the muesli drum that was the size of a cement mixer.”Basically, it’s the bloody zoo,” he said “That’s rare. He gave her the set of his face that had made him an excellent salesman when he’d commenced in animal feeds, a smile just restrained behind the lips and eyes, a smile it was impossible not to feel dawning in answer behind her own skin.”My wife’ll take a selection of fresh fruit, a yoghurt shake and six prunes in a glass bowl.