Sublime

Her few clothes hung austerely on a rail, and a television overlooked the foot of the bed; she watched it indiscriminately and with confusion, trying to make Bethesda’s child into an ordinary woman. And indeed she was ordinary, where certain essential matters were concerned – had not believed in hell since the day she’d laughed at the belt in her f

Sapphists

sybarite.

This is like fear, she thought, it’s as if I’m afraid for my life – and in fact she was afraid for her life, which she had created out of whatever leftovers she had to hand, and which she sometimes loved.

Grace Macaulay – in whose veins ran Essex rivers and Bible ink; in whose philosophy the devils of hell and the saints of Bethesda did battle with her reason and her nature – sat with her phone on the bare floor of a Hackney room and thought of Thomas Hart. Come home, he’d written, you wretched child, and I am wretched, she thought, and I think I’d

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet