Visitor.

Most of the things I write about have some sort of creativity as their engine: memories of how things were, or ideas about how they might be, with words wrapped around them for effect.

I don't, then, generally bother with things which I am directly experiencing at the time of writing - the Spanish estoy pensando, present continuous.

It is different at the moment, though. There is a spider, large by English standards, roaming the downstairs part of the house, and it is this which occupies my thoughts, my typing.

I first saw him (they're always male, in colloquial spoken English) on Thursday night, half-emerged from a small hole at the bottom of the door frame. There have been a few of them guarding that little entrance since I moved here in April, recoiling back into their abode when the pressure of my foot stirs the ground next to them.

Not this dinner-plate, though. I can walk past with deliberately heavy footsteps, and the spider remains rudely stationary. This is an inversion of the natural order of things, and I feel affronted. David is giving Goliath, in relative terms, the middle finger.

Some 30 minutes ago, I detected movement from the corner of my left eye. Inevitably, my intruder had broken cover and taken residence under one of the wooden bars connecting two of the table legs in the living room. I orbited it, fitfully, for what seemed like an eternity, trying to ascertain the best angle to launch a rescue mission with a giant soup mug - the largest drinking vessel I own.

I tentatively dabbed - this is the best word, for it implies no conviction - the mug within the vicinity of the spider on two occasions, both time withdrawing my hand as though next to a hotplate. I stood back to admire its circumference, even pausing to take a photograph with my mobile phone (from a distance of a few feet, coward that I am.)

Then, gone, and I don't know where. I shifted my gaze for a matter of seconds, and my opponent had made its next move. I now scan the room anxiously - the walls, the floor, around the corners of objects.

I shan't kill it, even if spiders do possess all the characteristics to spark a cognitive emergency. Their very shape - that of a cracked windscreen - spells danger; their movement a confusing blur. This goes for the limp English ones as much as those which carry a genuine threat.

Yet I implore myself not to harm them. Should we not show our house guests hospitality, even if conversation is difficult and we'd much rather they go back to their own place? I shan't kill it, even though visions of it have disturbed my sleep for the last few nights; nightmares of swallowing it whole.

No horror writer could devise a more sinister enemy than the monster which generates spiders willy-nilly, impaled in victims like death stars. The corner of my kitchen seems to generate them regularly.

Disconnection.

The incremental awakening, as though from a long sleep, that all is not as it should be; an awareness that some aspect of my being had been imperceptibly shifted.

Rolling within me, and stretching its deadened fingers, the shock of movement coursing through the bones, conscious heaviness, the apertures of the eyes swimming with confusion. Disconnection of time and space and places.

The shock to kickstart consciousness - a set of traffic lights at half past eight in the evening. The sky a starry dish; laughing and shouting superimposed onto the sound of vehicles rumbling up to the junction.

Lights burning red, forever, isolating one side of the road from the rest of the planet. Comeonthefuck, impotent disquiet at this machine-imposed exile.

The unsleeping. Something yawned and intoned: you have lost yourself, through its slack, dreaming mouth. Its tiredness a striptease, to be removed one garment at a time. The unsightly, inelastic flesh below that of a figment of the imagination, the monsters conjured by four-year-olds.

Lights glowing red, angrily. Every human who has ever lived knows that this means danger. It is a tic of the brain, a flaw. On the pavement, stasis.

A machine with lights controlling a machine with wheels, controlling a bad-tempered, disbelieving man whose ghosts beat softly, like the wings of a symmetrical butterfly, within him.

You have lost yourself.

Secrets.

My existence remains a secret to many of the people closest to Bluefish.

Some of them may have guessed me - a hazy, shadowy creature crouching in the darkened corner of her soul - but others will have no idea at all.

To solve a puzzle, first you must have some idea of its parameters*. My congratulations go to those who realised there is a puzzle at all (hinted at by a change of some description in Bluefish. A far-away look in her eye? A sense of her being simultaneously present and absent from conversation?) - and made the intellectual leap upwards and forwards.

It doesn't concern me that I am Bluefish's known unknown. She sought confirmation of this over the past few days, and promised to rectify it should it hurt or distress me. There is no great need to fix anything, though. I am the current which pushes the blood around her veins, and she brings about my negation - transforming that which is destroyed, humourless and empty.

I have always been the jealous type. This means that it is not enough to merely share love with another person. Our names must be picked out in hot, bright stars, visible from any point on the surface of the earth. News channels must roll, endlessly, with the thunderclap of the revelation.

Yet I find that I can more than tolerate being her secret. It's something which is preferable. Does this volte-face come from being secure in her love - the final admonishment to thirty years of self-depreciation - or is it something different; an awakening, a realisation?

Its two mindsets describe the difference between romantic love and unsustainable, dangerous love. Now, it is enough that the thought of me can cause her to smile to herself. It no longer must be a matter of public record, for the act itself is all.

Unsustainable love declares that everything must be acknowledged, judged and valued externally, and it quickly burns itself out.

*There are millions of ways to waste time trying to solve the Tower of Hanoi, and only a few correct methods. Its parameters are every way, successful or otherwise, in which its constituent discs can be manipulated.

Jacques (I).

An extract from "Poids de rien" publication date April 2010, leaked by a publishing industry mole to inmemoryofabsentfriends in mid-August.

"It was the first day of September in Alsace, but to Jacques it might as well have been the first day of any month.

His days weren't defined so much by the passage of time, but by the piles of stinking clothing he had to work through - other people's dirt his peculiar badge of sorrow.

Disgusting, filthy animals, up to their necks in shit. Like cattle - and the women were worse than the men, he had found.

Jacques - bespectacled and unsympathetic in this, his 52nd year - mused on the strange discrepancy he had uncovered during the course of his job in Ninot's oppressive dry-cleaner's. Why is it that women should happily sink in their own ablutions when the mythical creature which lives in his mind is its exact opposite? As clean and pure and ungraspable as steam: this is a woman.

Oh, the oppression! If Jacques' life had been a pack of cards, every one he drew would have led him down this path of muck and heat and misogyny. 52 cards in the stack, each the bearer of some unlucky symbol or distant misfortune. Now they were all exhausted.

The first day of September, like the first of July, the first of February, promised nothing. The weight of nothing multiplied by nothing, months gathering months, a gaping, living zero, was an immense burden to Jacques. Zeroes pushing against each other, heads in a crowd.

Stinking clothes discarded by abnormal citizens. The only cipher he could push down between the days to differentiate one from the other."

Gods (II).

The Christian church remonstrates bitterly with those who steal from God - persecuting them up until death, and then blackening their names happily ever after.

God made the universe and all that's in it, say the scriptures, and any refutation of this ancient assertion is tantamount to stealing food from the holy table; inserting a finger into the holy anus.

The Catholic church hounded Galileo to his grave. Even now, in the supposedly civilised 21st century, the theory of evolution is sometimes accepted only tentatively. It might appear that natural selection is blind, but this randomness is perfectly logical when the enormous mind of God appraises it; or it is a celestial trick to trap unbelievers - true followers can see that all creatures are immutable, and only those tainted by the devil infer variation.

What is it that upsets the church so much, specifically? Supporting the view that the earth revolves around the sun, declaring that humans are descended from apes, upholding the random nature of the motion of the quantum, all shunt our species from the centre of the universe to somewhere on its outskirts.

We are just apes, on an unprivileged planet, who are made of imperceptible chunks of matter whose trajectory we couldn't predict even if our eyes could resolve them. Freud hammered another nail into our sensibilites when he argued that even our thought processes have been hijacked - the id is capable of leaking through cracks in the consciousness and swamping us with its primitive desires. Where we come from, where we live, our destiny and our self-control - all ransacked.

But there is one crime worse than any of these solid scientific discoveries. The day human beings invented god sowed the seeds of our doom. If people are made in the image of god then, it stands to reason, we can aspire to be gods.

People with sublime talent, those who achieve highly, so the idea goes - these are the ones who are gods-on-earth. Smaller than god, and without his long reach and pulverising fist, maybe, but his ferocious stamp seared into their flesh is evidence enough.

These people are the ones we have all heard of, whom we talk about in revered tones as we queue up for lunch in the works canteen, whom we read about to pass the time on train journeys. Even those of us who don't own a television, we still can't escape, for aeroplanes write their names on the sky, and tangled lovers draw their likenesses in the sand.

Yet what of these great people? They are not god, and their longing is to be flung back down onto the earth with the rest of us. So they get pissed, show their vulnerability by sleeping with anything that moves, turn their first names into a dimunitive, speak about how much they like going down to the football ground, or how EastEnders is what helps them get away from themselves.

Yes, the worst thing the church ever did was create the church. They have made bastard gods out of people with a grain of talent, and for this there will be no forgiveness.

Gods.

I've spent my whole life being chased by other people's gods, and running away into the shadows until they get sick of trying to recruit me to their cause.

There was the Catholic god when I was young: austere and vengeful in the tales told by my mother as she recalled her upbringing under his auspices - sanctioning twisting of hair, striking with a cane and refusing to bury those who have ever been divorced. Like the airbrushed London gangsters of the 1960s, he only punishes those who are asking for it.

I tried to talk to this god, but I saw him for what he is. He cast a shadow over the very sick beginning of my life when I could have fallen at any minute from my slender tightrope. Death being at least as likely a possibility as survival, I was christened at the age of three hours. That my father had sidestepped the Catholic church was (literally) a sin to my grandmother, and I always assumed I'd never really been forgiven.

I spent time melting away to the sanctuary of an upstairs room, or trying not to let my breathing be heard, when Jehovah's Witnesses arrived at the door brandishing their dogma, repeated for posterity in innumerable copies of Watchtower.

There has been the need to raise my voice in the street - the last bastion of those with no further argument - to the proselytisers who care about the destinty of my mortal soul.

Then there are the African gods, whose roots are not suspended in the sky, but preserved in every cat, person, stone and house that has ever existed. The fatal lack of of empirical observation condemns those, too, though: while those with the power to see such things can tell a sick tree from a healthy one because of the strength of its life force, I can only see a tree.

I've spent forever either fleeing such gods, or frozen in terror at the thought of them. Now, the ironic thing is that I've lifted a fragile, reluctant woman onto the pedestal from which gods stare down icily, and just as she was warming to her role as my arbitor, she had to leave.

So I am, once again, without religion - and without religion, it was observed, man is nothing. This time, though, it has been wrenched from my grip instead of relinquished voluntarily. The scorch marks are striped and sore on my fingers: stigmata.

Poetess.

I come back to you every time, and it is no longer a shock.

To get anywhere, you have to start your journey - but my journeys are always circular, and they all terminate with you.

For ten years or more, a third of a lifetime, you have been my reference point. You gave birth to the twin ideas, both of them corrosive, that it is possible to become sufficiently depleted that the only option remaining is to take your own life; and that no great experiences are required to produce writing of huge significance.

Worse still, the logical conclusion of the two concepts above is that a writer is elevated to immortality upon an untimely or inexplicable death.

I was supposed to be dead eight months ago, according to the timetable I made when you first broke my skin and took residence there: the great weight which I drag with me everywhere. Had I been more brave, the thin gruel of my own words would have sold maybe a hundred copies by now. The shifting, celebrity-obsessed western society would have made sure that I had my five minutes, and then cast me aside in open-mouthed anticipation of its next victim.

At thirty I intended to die; to fill the oven with my oversized head and replicate your end. I wished to rise so that we might compare notes - you, whose tree overhangs with serious, difficult fruit - and the butcher could have made off with my sarcophagus.

Now you are not a harbinger of death but instead postpone it. In times of crisis I listen to you read your slow, devastating poetry, and I swear it is a form of medicine. I am not replenished by you; no - you complete the process of hollowing-out, that I might begin again.

The bare bones are yours, oh butcher, but the virgin residue which will re-commence filling them out any minute now is my future. That my new, fragile skin is made from your own laboratory-synthesised genetic material is a secret neither of us have to share.

Origins.

I wonder about the origins of our biases and convictions in the light of an observation made by Bluefish in the last few hours.

Since her condition has deteriorated, it is a fact that I have found communication with Bluefish more difficult. Why is this?

I contend that the reason is because, from somewhere, I have convinced myself that it is a source of irritation to the unwell to be weighed down with trivialities. In other words: conduct your business quickly, decisively, and then leave her body to mend. This mindset has become a source of conflict between Bluefish and I because, she laments, she needs my presence now more than ever.

So where did it come from, then, the notion that it is improper to laugh with or eat up the day of those who are sick? (I should clarify that Bluefish is not on the 'endangered' list.) As I write, I realise precisely why she might appreciate now more than at other times an opportunity to be leavened from pain; to be distracted by anything at all. Yet still, my stubborn viewpoint persists.

I remember a book called 'Carrie's War,' which I recall had the stink of misery and sickness and overwhelmed, seething patients seemingly drifting from every page - the doomed Mrs. Gotobed.

I remember my grandfather announcing: they gave me some good news today! I've got two weeks to live!

I know how I behave when I have anything from a headache to something which requires a hospital visit - unbearably, illogically angry with anything which dares to intersect my path. Just as the drunk feels free to punch you in the face because he is no longer in control, I find myself biting back rage and frustration. It is the only time that such thick, dark emotions come to dominate me.

There is, I realise, an element of fear (on my part) here too. I am scared that I am no longer the one doing the steering, and that Bluefish is not permitted to steer herself either. Instead, we are at the mercy of something abstract, something which has overloaded her and stolen the thunder of both of us.

This is the frightening thing about (even non life-threatening) illnesses. They arrive unannounced and cleave that which was unbreakable straight through the middle. It's no longer just you and I, love.

A confession, too. I am scared of dying, and any illness demands that we, for a moment, look our own mortality squarely in the eyes. The thing about existence, so the joke goes, is that nobody ever got out alive, and I contemplate this with a shiver.

Illness.

Is it possible for a person to be so ill or miserable that their condition has an effect on someone else located an arbitrary distance away?

Some sets of twins supposedly have this characteristic: when you're cut, we both bleed. This telepathy is cultivated by shared nature, and shared nurture.

What about outside such an immediate family environment? What does it mean when Bluefish, in Canberra, has been cut and I in England metaphorically bleed for her?

The romantic in me rushes to the surface and cries: this is the ultimate expression of love! To be joined in an intimate, lockstep dance with the sick girl from whom I am separated by thousands of miles of ocean!

In ecstasy, we point out where the malfunctoning of one is replicated and amplified in the other. This love needs no external validation, for it exists haughtily above the abyss of men in their dirt and cowardice!

Yet although we are correct, we are mistaken. It is true that when Bluefish suffers, I concurrently suffer, waking up from bad dreams with an anguished yell. We are one: you with your neck; and I with my nightmares. In the near future when the surgeons pull out your agony by its roots, and kill it stone dead, I too shall shed blood.

There, though, the correlation ends. When the toxins which are presently polluting your system are a fading memory, I'll still spend my sleeping time bellowing out the past, existing uncomfortably in this unnatural furrow, returned indefinitely to the stale, sweating pit in which I've spent all but five weeks.