The audience could be divided into three parts: those behind the sweep of red, velvet curtain that cut off all sight lines, stage right; those in the auditorium who could see Elizabeth alone at the grand piano her white collar dividing her beautiful, dark face from her black dress; and those all across America listening to the broadcast.

Most of them rapt.

The crowd whispered and coughed as Elizabeth settled at the keyboard. The slightness of her frame, the long curve of her throat and the tight bun into which her curls were twisted gave the audience the impression that they were watching a young ballerina rather than a pianist.

The whispers and coughs gave those listening at home a sense of peculiar intimacy, ears pressed to the keyholes of their radios.

I remember listening to Radio Luxembourg on my transistor radio, labelled ‘Benkson’, via a single earpiece of smooth plastic shaped like the lidded cork of a sherry bottle, rounded, and, for example, hearing ‘The Seven Seas of Rye’ for the first time; the glorious sweep of rock accelerating, delivered via an uncomfortable funnel, the imagination allowed so much.

Elizabeth was blind and the violinist she accompanied was the living half of a Siamese Twin who carried his quiescent brother’s head and torso like a light haversack, on his back.

You know, this is very much like a story in the form of text and illustrations by an artist called Pollock, Ian Pollock I think, that I read at someone’s house. I remember the book vividly, the illustrations were hideous and sad, I think the plot hinged on a third head emerging.

I remember feeling unwelcome in the living room wherever it was that I was, but compelled to finish the text, rather than just riffling through the illustrations. There you are, an observation.

There’s some background here about Elizabeth being the daughter of the nurse of a plantation heiress, learning to play the piano alongside the daughter of the house. The heavy whisper of curtains in the drawing room as the fragrant lemon groves are revealed and the room fills with the scent of lemon and jasmine.

The pearly touch of the keyboard, soft blond ringlets, tight black curls, tortoiseshell comb, white cotton - all luminescing against hard polished surfaces rich with wax. The ivory of the keyboard connecting via the dark continent with the ivory-like plug in my ear beneath the bedclothes.

And of course, the rearing of the mutant in a New Orleans cat house, where the girls are so good to the poor boys. Teasing the doubled to life along with some voodoo blues thrashed out of the stand-up eighty-eight with a jewelled snake-eye cane by a huge, blind man in a sharp, black suit. Cain and Abel, Elvis and his brother. So very folkloristic.

And the clever, urbane music publisher from London dragged downstairs in his nightshirt, slightly drunk, to hear the little monster play prodigy fiddle. Dragged also across the boreal night in a great black starliner, through the icebergs all the way from London, lying becalmed this autumn by the unusual number of deaths.

The chance meeting in the corridor of the music school, the juxtaposition too cute to be missed even by the governors. Beauty and beast, black and white, the classical and aboriginal traditions inverted, the discipline of Europe arriving from Africa, voodoo from a little white twin. All of this beautifully and elaborately sketched out in all of its russian doll, chinese sphere, mirrored triplicity, up/down, good/bad, live/dead and on and on until you’re sick of it.

And all of a sudden a fax in flames pumps out of the machine.

Elizabeth lifts her hands and the audience is immediately hushed. Her hands seem only to rest on the keyboard and the hall is filled with sound. As are a hundred thousand homes across the continent of North America.

The first notes fall like winter rain, rise and fall, the air aching for the first soft sound of the violin upon it.

Notes like: glossy raindrops, splashing onto the leaves of the lemon-trees that stretched in neat rows far away into the richly scented night. No. Notes like: being in the car with the engine turned off and the rain beating down on the metal roof as the windows cloud over with breath. No. Notes like: rain dropping from the black eaves, to the balcony, along the washing line, to drip from its long arc into the wide stone pool of the fountain in the courtyard as the sun comes out again after the Mississippi storm. Absolutely not. Notes like: one last try, the bright tears of angels falling across eternity into the open mouths of the damned granting the cool, liquid bliss of redemption. Maybe not.

The piano had started to play, Elizabeth the agent. Soon it would be joined by the violin. Of this much we could be sure, DV.

Now a little about the violinist. He has the eyes of an angel from a painting by Fra Angelico, he has golden curls, exquisite lips and a sack of dreaming bones on his back, bumping against him as he plays, one withered arm tucked around his shoulders behind his neck in enduring companionship. If pushed, he will state that his brother Nicodeme, is his ‘battery’: the energy source for his playing.

However it is done, the fact is that it is done supremely well. Toussaint and Elizabeth are a phenomenon. This is the latest of tens of concerts across America. Each sold out. A sensation: the demure, black girl at the piano, the monster’s bow dripping with golden fire behind the velvet screen. The mystery. The horror. The beauty. The stories. The music. Which, of course, never once existed. Above all, the music which never once existed.

The music fills the hall with a beauty that belies the sensation at its springs into foam on a comber. Rigorous analysis will not diminish it as it twists and veers dripping with meaning in the air above the audience, the consummation of the three-part marriage of the technical, the spiritual and the physical. This is music with a soul, that never once existed. Music that never once existed.

Away with anything that explores the limits of the tolerable.

So you might start with a bath full of water in a block of flats somewhere - and of course, you might end up anywhere you wished.

And the special significance of the music was the sense of it tearing itself apart, of the piano and the violin creating a tension that implied an imminent tear in the very fabric of nature.

The audience was unsoothed by this music, rather pulled to a pitch of intense concentration. Concentrating intensely in an intellectual sense as much as in a prurient sense.

The music swung through the air, howling and swooping above the slightly up-tilted faces, it conveyed an impression of immense size and weight but supreme manoeuvrability, deftness, agility as it became increasingly substantial in the air - as if a powerful aeroplane of flexible construction lit internally by the fires of scripture were performing loops, stalls and Immelmanns above the crowd. Their faces touched by the breath of its passing.

The tension between the two sources of sound was modulating, changing inflection, resolution was an aching chasm at its heart.

The argument had been going on for several hours, I had drunk a great deal of bad, white wine and smoked over sixty cigarettes. No violence had been used by either party. Arguing is what I am best at.

Arguing with colleagues, relatives, lovers, people in the street, on the tube, on the train, in the off-licence, arguing with everyone about everything all the time.

And all the time seeking repose?

Fuck off.

And no lucky equipoise available between conscious and unconscious, asleep and awake, drunk and sober, drugged and undrugged. No happenstance of peace.

And all the time saying to myself: ‘Why not imagine a beauty that is inexpressible?’.

Unseen by the audience lost in the special, thick, silky atmosphere of the enchantment, Elizabeth plunged the perfect tines of her fingers precisely into the keyboard, stabbing the air to death, as the bow stroked raw across.

There was the usual silence caught in the collective throat, instantly dappled by firecrackers of handclapping thrown here and there in the huge hall that became an enormous July 4th explosion, a de-railing transcontinental express of praise. Elizabeth sat at the keyboard, upright, head bowed, motionless.

The curtain did not even sway.

In the garage was a heavy wooden workbench that had been built, by my great uncle, on a prolonged visit, to the irritation of my father. I could also see, even as a child, that my father loved his wife’s uncle and therefore the bench, but that the bench would need to be used for every last, irritating chore that fell to him to perform using a workbench and that, therefore, he hated it.

Next to the bench was a pale blue peg-board between the two windows in that part of the garage. I think that this came from my father’s job as a salesman of non-prescription pharmaceutical goods in some way. Most of the tools he used hung from this pegboard.

Like the bath, the peg-board always presented itself to me as a locus for pain. Child, adult, either way, the peg-board said ‘pain’. Not ‘irritation’, it was the work bench that said ‘irritation’.

My father used to say ‘Patience is a word for thick buggers who can’t think quick enough’ and, proudly, I used to attribute the saying to him or his father. I later read the phrase in a novel by a comedian that he admired.

It is never enough to wish to kill oneself, it is never enough to possess the necessary will to kill oneself, it is none of it ever enough. Neither is chance. Enough.

Outside the stage door a large car waited, reflecting the white explosions of the cameras as the performers left the building, umbrellas, capes, scarves, forming a lattice impenetrable to film, splinters of flashlight strobing crazily inside, lighting cloth, flesh, hair, a jewel, the edge of an eye, lips.

The car door closed with a clunk and inside the silence was heavy with cigar smoke. One-way windows showed hands and faces smearing white against the dark glass as the car pulled away.

"Make love with me, Elizabeth."

"No, Toussaint."

"Make love with Nicodeme, Elizabeth."

"No, Toussaint."

He walked slowly along the canal path towards Birmingham, where Birmingham had irrupted into Arden, where Birmingham had irrupted into Arcadia.

Light industrial units on either side of the banks, the occasional tunnel marked, at well above head height sometimes, perhaps only in his imagination, by the boots of the men who had walked the boats through in the absence of horses, or engines, or sufficient towpath, or whatever.

As if simply by walking it all arrived.

A few trees framed a skewed view of a carpark behind a small factory. There were some scraps of litter and dry leaves caught in an eddy of wind in a corner of the carpark, beneath a window where a woman stood talking into a telephone, from the neck up.

I had been trying for some time to pierce the cellophane wrapper of another packet of cigarettes with my thumbnail in a way I had either read in an American detective story or seen in a film - the longer I tried to do it, the more I inclined to think it had been a novel rather than a film. At the same time I continued to argue about my rights, responsibilities, feelings.

I described an ideal situation in which my lover would behave towards me with the correct mixture of spontaneity and responsibility.

Technically, I suppose what I was after was an immensely intelligent home, containing a human pet that performed a variety of social, but primarily sexual, duties with unfeigned enthusiasm and acumen. I continued to argue that this was what my lover not only should have recognised as her moral duty to provide, but also should have wished, to provide. At some stage in this argument she had been crying a lot and her face was pale and her eyes smaller than before. She was explaining her feelings to me again: feelings of hopelessness, feelings of repulsion.

Feelings of repulsion.

They walked along the carpet, protected by a rain-runner and the Upper West Side in Coney Island canopy, to security at the door, no longer defended from a more deferential press. A glance at one of the photographs taken here might help:

Elizabeth stands out from the chaotic background like a cut-out overlaid from another photograph with added drop-shadow. Her shaded eyes seem to scour the floor, the planes of her face reflecting the flash, her coat stretches to the ground, one thigh, implausibly long pushing against it from inside, her hands clasped, twisted in front of her, wrists pressed together. She seems in control of the space she occupies whilst ashamed of her own dignity. At her right side walks Toussaint, his hand on her upper arm to guide her and support the three of them. His fair curls have bleached out in the photograph and the head of his brother looms from behind, hooded by the violinist’s cape. Toussaint is smiling and untroubled by the photographer, returning the mechanical stare with insouciance.

Nothing special really, nothing remarkable in this day and age.

Two very attractive people.

I always ended up alone, after it all, always alone, writing poetry and drinking spirits, taking drugs, working. The firm and unshakeable foundation upon which my life and work has been built: selfishness.

I walked as far as a lock-gate in the West Midlands, grey-green fields stretching in all directions. Cows nearby barely visible through the level drizzle, the surface of the canal untroubled by the fineness of the rain. Some low hills over to the right, some trees, a hedge, the other side of it a road, a white transit van travels behind the hedge, heading north, only visible every now and then. I notice that my coat has a hood. I think, ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?’, sniggering. I light a nasty cigarette, turn around and head south, my glasses misting over with the fine rain.

The balcony is in the air above Manhattan, only directly above the terrace is the sky dark blue. Everywhere else around the horizon is ablaze with light. Every street, every glittering avenue, opening somewhere to the sea.

Beneath the terrace roof, sailing above the light, above the sea, sit Toussaint and Elizabeth, staring out over the park.

"You are certain we aren’t overlooked?", said Elizabeth.

"Certain.", said Toussaint, "They’ve been up everything nearby to check.".

She threw her sunglasses onto the table, stood and stretched, looping her arms backwards in a great arc, pushing her hips forward and letting her head loll back between the wings, her shoulderblades. He flung off the cape, shirt and began to fumble with the many stumbling-block buckles that held his prosthetic brother to his back and side. They both wore intent expressions, in fact they all wore intent expressions on their faces.

I go in through the alley at the side of the garage, past the dustbins, pushing the door open into the back of the garage, past the bicycles, the pegboard, the workbench, and then through the heavy wooden door into the kitchen. Right, quickly through the kitchen into the hall tensed against a voice saying ‘hello?’, up the stairs, treading on the edges, a step next to a door jamb, another, silent pressure on the handle and into the yellow room. Quickly to the edge of the bed facing the window and sit, breathing quietly but heavily, scanning the silence of the house, eyes shut, willing it to be empty. Nothing to be heard but the light rain blown against the pane.

As they held each other close, the clever, leather and latex prosthesis slung over the back of the chair, they heard, between looks that drank at their alternate souls, the sound of vast wings, the sound of turbulence.

"I can’t be bothered with this any more.", she said half way through the speech about her feelings. She looked at me with the drained white face she wore, letting that face slide behind as she lit a cigarette and said, without a hint of rebuke:

"Why don’t you serrate your thumbnail? Or slit the cellophane first? Or conceal a razor-blade beneath your thumb? You’re driving me mad scrabbling away at the packet like that."

I felt remorse slipping as usual into my chest. "We can stop now if you want. If you’d prefer?", I said.

"Yes, let’s stop now.", she said.

The sound grew louder, and seemed to rise towards them from below. Wings, vast wings like a lazy hurricane perfumed with fuel.

Blazing with tens of arc lights and floodlights the helicopter rose above the terrace and hung in the air twenty yards from them smiting them with light and the wind from its rotors, the table and chairs toppled over and rolled lazily towards the lounge, the leather and latex prosthesis slid along the floor, one withered arm trailing, fingers trembling, lifted briefly by the echoing wind in fond farewell, they held each other tight as roses from the balcony whipped through the air and passed them in the air, leaving little drawstrings, beads of blood across their arms. The tail of the helicopter bucked up and down but the searchlights remained trained on them as the great cloud of wind and light exploded again and again with the flash from the cameras. The black Manhattan night filled with the stink of fuel, the white arcs of light and the unbearable shuddering of the blades through the air.

The unbearable shuddering of blades through the air.

Blackness, white light, thundering noise, fuel stink, icy, cutting wind and a red dewdrop of blood caught, salty-iron on the tip of her perfect, pink tongue.