“I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it but I didn’t. Not really. Only the smudginess of it, the pink slippered all contained semiprecious eagerness of it. I didn’t realise it sometimes would be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea, because it’s the halves that halve you in half. I didn’t know; don’t know about the in-between bits of it. The gory bits of you and the gory bits of me.”