And the forty tellings, which started that same evening.
On the Saturday night, in a hotel room
at Vayle Harbour, with the girls asleep and Dinah in the next room, I rang my sister and gave it to her for about an hour.
And by the second telling, on the Sunday, it had the shape it has now.
The crowd. The kiss. What he said about men. And then: look to your right.
And then the pause, which everybody fills in themselves.
And there is one line I have never varied, and it is the one that does the work.
***I only found out standing in that terminal.***
I have said that, in some form, about forty times. To my sister. To four women at the baby group. To the solicitor, who did not need it. To a neighbour in a shop in the December.
And it is the only untrue sentence in the whole of my account, and it is the load-bearing one.
