A Walk in the Woods

---

A Walk in the Woods

It's a warm spring day in the beech wood and I'm following them along the path. They're an old couple, very familiar with each other, talking with that easy animation that comes from a long relationship, they seem happy with each other.

At this hour of the morning, the wood is pretty empty. The sun shines between the trees, some ancient, others new plantation. You can hear the birds which flicker between these old trees, although the newer conifers in their dense blackness are less popular. 

Still unseen, I move a little closer.

They come upon a bench and decide to sit down. I hover close by out of sight, screened by bushes - and listen shamelessly. It's interesting, those intimate conversations between established couples when they think no-one else is around. And always the same topics amongst the old: sex and death.

---

He said, in a bantering tone, “You know I've been reading the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church and it says in there that cremation is perfectly okay after death - provided that you still believe in the resurrection of the body.”

She said, “I still want to be buried; I want a cardboard coffin. Nothing too big or ornate so that I can join the Earth after I die.”

“If we die together," he continued, "I've said in my Will that we should be buried together. Obviously I'd have to be lying on top of you.”

At this she cackled and demurred, and he said, “Of course, to get us both into that cardboard coffin, those limbs of yours - all of them - are going to have to be wrapped pretty tight around me. I'm almost looking forward to it!”

And she laughed again, blushing, and suddenly became very interested in the clouds.

---

And I felt my cheeks colouring, and stole away into the greenwood.

Viaticum - a short story by Adam Carlton

Viaticum 

They had stationed microphones around his deathbed. I imagine because they wanted to capture his last words or something - and they had an AI to figure out all that mumbling, figure out what it thought he was really trying to say.

---

“They'll think I'm stupid asking for the viaticum but it's a comfort, it's a framework and it's a process. And is it so very different from the opium of the hospital?"

---

“I have a memory which demands my attention. She's sitting back in her chair and she's arguing with me: one of her pet peeves (the bins?) and I'm thinking that this means we're not going to make it tonight. But as she leans back, I see her bare legs, more of them than usual because the hem of her skirt’s riding up - and unconsciously she's looking awfully inviting."

---

“I like to believe that I'm not that different from the other consciousnesses who flit about this room: some of them busy; some of them patient with me.

"I imagine myself in their position: thinking rather predictable thoughts; feeling rather predictable feelings - and I think I'm not so special and when I do go there'll be something very much like me in the heads of those people.

"My very personal memories will be abolished - theirs won't. And, as I think Mr. Musk once observed, the flame of consciousness in the universe will flicker a moment, but not die. I find that remarkably reassuring."

---

“I was never happier than when I was in bed with her. Wrapped around her body, her night dress hoisted up, my arm under her breasts. I could have stayed there for hours, half-asleep, feeling her curves under my palm. And indeed I did stay for hours until finally she would say, it's time to get up, and I would have to mask my disappointment.

"I'm not especially needy, but even I knew that neediness would have been the most potent poison for our relationship."

---

“No, I don't believe I'm to be reunited with her. But nor do I believe the present moment is all there is. Both the past and future are like amber. I was very mindful never to be gratuitously unpleasant with her if I could help it: - all my actions under the aspect of eternity."

---

“It's astonishingly hard to really believe the world will go on in my absence. Deep down, I think everyone believes that the safe continuance of things really requires one's continuing and persistent attention."

---

“I sometimes used to wake up disbelieving that any part of my ‘official life' was real. Was I really married? And for five decades? If true I'm astonished at my immense good fortune. Today, at this moment, I'm questioning it again.

Derealisation Disorder."

---

“I am meant to confess - you see, I am still learning the ropes. But sin has always puzzled me: I always tried to control what I did according to my own standards; generally I did not let myself down. And it seems beside the point to scrape the bottom of the barrel for trivialities - de minimis.

So my stay in Purgatory promises to be brief?"

---

“A life - my life! - is a strange thing even in retrospect. I suppose I always wanted to make a difference. Not so much for prestige or fame or any of that. I just felt deep inside that I had a duty of care for the world. Sounds self-importantly idiotic, doesn't it: - but emotions never have to justify themselves."

---

“They say you have no real memory of pain - afterwards. They say that childbirth depends on it. I'll generalise: you can't anticipate emotions either.

"I knew it would be bad afterwards, that I would miss her. 

“It's a thing isn't it, that desolation; people write books - which I have mocked. But knowing is one thing, while actually feeling it is …"

---

“I don't know why we should rage against the dying of the light? But then, I've always distrusted raw emotion - now is not the time to change the habit of a lifetime. The Church says instead we should die with dignity - and in that, at least, I concur.”

---

The priest had finished his business, the bleeping had stopped. The nurse methodically unplugged the wires and tubes: the orderlies liked a clear run at it. 

The microphones registered only silence; the AI had nothing left to transcribe; the universe continued - save for a brief flicker.

---

Anomaly - a short SF story by Adam Carlton

---

‘Anomaly’ - a short story by Adam Carlton

1. Adèle

Our survey ship spins down from configuration space, materialises in a cloud of evanescent photons - and settles into synchronous orbit around Anomaly. This is only our third flight, and everything is still new to us. I spare a thought for the intrepid explorers of the old Empire who first reached this super-remote system millennia ago, but only after years of boosted fusion flight, centuries of cold sleep.

“Adèle, is the AI prepped up yet?” demands Cateline.

So peremptory, so big and bouncy. So here to give us all a bit of get up and go.

“Patience,” I say.

This was the last planet the Empire reached, shortly before the Fall. Records from the time are sketchy - we don’t understand the collapse at all but the coincidence sometimes gets people on edge. Recovery took us so long - two thousand years from a remnant population of nearly zero.

We were almost wiped out.

We have an advantage over their extraordinary powers in just one field: our deloc drive, which makes distance immaterial. This planet - Anomaly - was at the very boundary of the old Empire's domain, almost sixteen light years out. Really hard to get to.

But three hours ago we were all having coffee in the departure lounge, back on Earth.

The drive burrows beneath the metric structure of space-time. Down there at the Planck scale distance is just ... irrelevant. The theory was discovered just a few years ago, they only recently got the engineering to work. We are the one and only survey mission ... and this is our third flight, the ‘farthest’ yet.

Our final crew member is Elicia, our petite team historian cum archaeologist. She’ll be investigating the previous expedition. We believe there will be ruins.

---

That's a remarkable planet beneath our ship, kind of what you’d like Earth to be. Some equatorial jungle but mostly semi-arid in the temperate zones - think southern France or Spain. Just the sort of place you’d have expected the Empire to have moved heaven and earth to colonise. But of course, as a culture they vanished before they could get round to it.

As the scientist of the party, I’ll be staying on board to work with the systems - which on cue come on line, the computer Alpha addressing us on the net.

“Adèle, we’re picking up a signal from a ground transponder. It’s very weak, no doubt the power source has decayed. The message is in Empire navy cypher. We don’t have decryption keys so it’ll be brute-forced. Invoking the quantum coprocessor now.”

We know about this protocol. Despite the awesome computational power we’re about to deploy I'm not expecting any immediate decrypt; we’ll just have to wait.

Cateline and Elicia are dressed to go. We don’t need spacesuits down there, it’s so warm my colleagues are in summer wear - though who Cateline is trying to impress I don't know.

They’re under constant surveillance by the ship - any issues their personal transporters will whisk them up here no problem.

The reason we called this planet Anomaly? - Well, there are two reasons. First, despite the abundant vegetation, there is a strange ecological hole in the biosystem. No animals larger than insects and mice: that’s a puzzle.

Secondly, there is a very large physical hole. It’s in the warm-temperate zone directly below our ship, near where the navy beacon is whispering its sad little coded signal. The depression is not natural and our best guess is that the Empire ship lofted a city-buster right onto the planetary surface. The crater is quite spectacular and it’s one of the first things we’ll be looking at (the radiation has quite decayed away by now).

Why would they have done that?

This place is full of tantalising mysteries

2. Cateline

Elicia and I translate to the surface, shimmering into existence in a sunlit glade. We're a kilometre from both the crater lip and that odd signal source. This will be our RV after we've walked around a bit, taking in the sights.

“... I'm getting an update from Alpha. It's a vector code so the top-level meaning is in the principal components, the ones we get first …”

Buzz, buzz, buzz. Adèle is a fly in a bottle. Should have been a librarian. Sure, we need techs - just not around me, thanks very much.

And there's Elicia, head bowed in thought, tottering off towards the ruins.

It's glorious to be off the ship! I stretch ... expand ... absorb the landscape! I could do a little jig here, limber up; something for my feed. But instead I stride off towards the crater. That should be a great sight, like that meteor thing in Arizona I saw pictures of once.

“... means we'll get the broad outline first, with the details later. Sorry folks …”

There are bushes, flowers! The air smells so sweet. Fragrances wafting past on a gentle breeze. It reminds me of the Ardèche of my youth - same countryside.

No paths - no animals! - but easy walking. I’m taking in the sights, the sounds. It’s quiet except for the bee-things. I’m heading for the crater edge, just a few hundred metres ahead.

Wait, this is interesting! It’s a conical hole, quite deep, three metres I'd say. It's like someone’s taken a very big ice-cream cone and pressed it, point first, hard into the ground.

Wow!

It’s about six metres across. The sloping dirt surface looks loose and crumbly.

Right, I’m at the edge here. It doesn’t go down to a pure point in the middle. Well naturally, soil would wash down. And at the bottom there seems to be something half-buried in the run-off, looks a bit gooey, like gelatine.

This all goes to the ship in real time so there’s no need for me to record anything special. Also, I don’t need anyone telling me to ‘be careful’ or demanding by-the-book observations. I’m going to explore. Let me just dig my heels in here at the top and take it steady.

3. Elicia

This place is so spooky. I’m on my way to the old base to see what’s there. It’s pleasant enough here but I feel like there are hidden eyes, you know? After all, what do we really know about this place - not much! I’ll be glad to get back on the ship.

I’ve studied the Empire for years. They consolidated on Earth then stretched out to other star systems as their ships improved. A paternalistic dictatorship; aggressive monopolies fuelling their imperialism.

We've learned some lessons this time around.

And then suddenly it all collapsed. Everywhere. It seemed to be all over in a year or so. The interstellar colonies withered and died, abandoned. Our records are fragmentary in the extreme. There are records of a new social movement, almost a new religion which swept the Earth shortly after the last starship returned.

Returned from here, actually.

The zealots of that new religion seemed to be in love with love itself. A frenzied desire to spread the message - which might not have mattered so much, but they seemed incapable of organisation. Wherever the new movement took over, collapse rapidly followed.

A small surviving remnant of the Empire’s ferocious military - dug in deep under the mountains of North America - decided global extermination was the only answer. Those fascists unleashed Armageddon! Humanity itself, along with all traces of civilisation, was almost completely obliterated. Their motivation is still a complete mystery but we live with the consequences of that reckless, final, genocidal act every single day.

Never again!

If there is anything intact here at the site, perhaps it will shed some further light on those distant and terrible atrocities.

OK, so I’m here. And, well ... this is a classic Empire defence bunker, isn’t it? Half-pipe construction, reinforced concrete on heavy foundations. Five metres high at the centre curving down to the ground. The whole thing is about 20 metres long with bulbous end-pieces. And there's the apron for the shuttle. Empty now of course.

The thing to remember is that the Empire was toxically militarised. With any new colony their first thought was to build this kind of site, hardened against even a close nuclear strike. Inside they'd place their command, control and communications protected by a dedicated squad. They’d build the research centre, and later the colony itself, at least a kilometre away.

The Empire was always nervous about threats - internal and external. Thank God we’ve evolved beyond that kind of paranoia: we don't even have a military.

Give peace a chance, hey?

So what happened here? It’s a mess, right? The walls in front of me are pockmarked with shell holes - and part of the end has been blown in. So that’s how the attackers got in. Then the nuke would have arrived from orbit and excavated that crater and you can see the effects here where the surface has been scorched. With the building breached no-one was going to survive that.

So what’s the real story? I’m thinking of that beacon we've picked up, squatting in its hardened repository deep inside this derelict fortress somewhere. Perhaps the beacon will tell us, once we crack the code.

4. Cateline

So several things happened at once. I’m like scree-walking my way down into this hole when the surface becomes a lot less supportive - and gives way. That half-obscured goo at the bottom's trembling now … the dirt slipping off it as I’m sliding down. The emerging, gelatinous lens is half my size!

I topple and fall right on to it, for a squishy landing.

Wow! I'm lying on my back at the bottom of a deep hole, looking up at the sky and a few wispy clouds - and the ship up there, though of course you can’t see it - and I’m feeling this jelly-mattress thing beginning to flow. Flow over my skin.

It’s not unpleasant. It’s quite warm in fact and it’s just flowing up my legs and arms, under my clothes, even over my face, though I’m not panicking. It’s warm like a bath and I lick my lips and it's sweet. I’m not at all worried as it covers my skin, my body, flowing into me everywhere it can.

I extend my tongue and taste my sticky fingers, lick at them ... hmm ... I reach down and smear the goo over my body. I don’t feel tempted to talk to anyone, it’s enough just to lie here and savour the feeling. So warm and good; drowsy contentment; like a pleasant dream.

I feel remarkably well … and revitalised. I get to my feet. A bit dizzy but it passes. The gelatine lump or whatever has quite vanished. The way cream vanishes into your skin, I suppose. But so what, it feels good!

I leave the depression with no difficulty at all and begin to lope in the general direction of Elicia.

5. Elicia

I’m hearing Adèle on the net, beaming down from orbit.

“We’re nearly finished with the decode but - take care down there. It’s just what you suspected, Elicia, there has been violence. It's the final transcript of traffic between the Empire ship and the ground commander in the bunker. He says a mob has advanced on the bunker.

‘... We're surrounded. There are researchers massed behind our security team - which has itself defected to the mob! They've trained their weapons on us. They're demanding we surrender and come out. We've checked: they have heavy anti-armour ordnance. It's possible they could force entry. We're in contact with the ship. Maintaining a stand-off for the time being …’

It’s still coming through. More in a few minutes. Puzzling isn’t it. This is very strange behaviour. What could possibly turn a bunch of sober scientists and a rough, tough security squad into …?"

But Elicia stops listening because Cateline has emerged into view, approaching while pulling off her top. Cateline with a big gloopy smile on her face which is odd, since she normally has little time for either of her crew-mates.

“Elicia,” Cateline whispers as she pulls up, and even her tone is strange, thinks Elicia, because it’s earthy, breathy, even erotic. Her lips are unusually red, cheeks blushing, pupils dilated. It’s really puzzling and unsettling, she thinks.

And Cateline is so big, and I am so small.

And because Elicia is polite and rational and small, she ignores that profound uneasiness which fuels a growing panic beneath her quiet, controlled exterior.

The kiss comes without warning. Soft at first, then urgent. The taste is strange - sweet, cloying, it spreads across her tongue. Elicia tries to pull away, but Cateline holds her fast, a hand firm at the small of her back.

Warmth pours through her, making her dizzy. The more she resists, the more her body betrays her - leaning in, answering pressure with pressure. Breath mingles. Fingers slide under clothes.

Panic flares, then ebbs. Concentration loosens, slips. Desire and fear coalesce. She clings to Cateline, not knowing whether she is yielding or consuming. When they break apart she is shaking, her lips still wet, her hunger raw. Cateline’s smile: a mask of barely-controlled passion.

Afterwards, they both experience an intense urge to return to the ship, to Adèle - and to get something to eat: they are suddenly ravenous.

6. Adèle on the net:

Adèle’s voice on the net: urgent, cracking...

“Stop where you are. I’ve got the transcript. It wasn’t an attack, it was contagion. Some kind of neuro-parasite. It infiltrates the host, takes the nervous system whole. And the host helps it, welcomes it. That’s why the soldiers defected. That’s why the scientists turned…”

---

Silence follows. Then a faint chime: transport signatures.

Cateline and Elicia materialise on the deck. They move with perfect coordination, smooth and deliberate. Their covetous eyes find Adèle at once.

Adèle stumbles back toward the console, pulse hammering. Her words tumble:

“Stay back. We can quarantine. We can—”

But they keep advancing, smiling in unison, radiating warmth and desire, footsteps slow but inexorable.

Adèle thinks of the drive, of the shimmering tunnel that leads home. Three hours to Earth. Three hours to the cities, the families, the billions.

Her hand searches for the emergency self-destruct - that option they never even trained for.

She hesitates, fumbling; their arms open wide, as if in welcome.

---

'You Are Not Here' - a short story by Adam Carlton

---

In my faded recollection, Kafka began his famous story by stating that Joseph K. must have done something wrong. Me too, I suppose, as I am similarly befuddled as to why I am here, in an all mod cons apartment as surely imagined by someone who has never seen one.

Still, I lack for nothing; I am surrounded by furnished sentience.

But you are not here.

Nor anyone else.

I remember once reading a female columnist who wrote for The Times newspaper. She was reminiscing about her husband, who had died, and her recollection was the very physical desire she had always felt for him. 

Even if she walked out into the garden and he was doing something mundane, weeding or planting vegetables, she would look at him and a kind of excitement would rise in her throat and she could imagine him strolling across, pulling her clothes off, making love to her on the lawn, there and then in the viscid heat of the moment.

The dense texture of daily life, suffused with sexual desire. That for her was the core of their enduring bond. 

I remember reading another author saying that when a man is away from home, perhaps travelling in hotels or in the army, sleeping alone in a cold, desolate, lonely place, his thoughts turn to all the women he has ever slept with. 

As someone who has spent plenty of nights away from home, travelling in faraway places, I can testify that one enumerates them, tries options, revels in stark physicality, immerses oneself in that woman who was dear to you in her nakedness with unbounded pleasure and no inhibitions - in your memory.

French author Michel Houellebecq tells us that when we talk to an attractive woman in a professional or business context, it’s civilised: polite, friendly and engaged. Yet if the woman is attractive that urgent thought recurs: what it would be like to be in bed with her; how would her restrained politeness melt? Offering no resistance, there would be flesh and passion and no boundaries - in your imagination.

And so my thoughts turn to you.

I remember once we went to the movies. We sat in a row perhaps halfway towards the screen. Before the main feature, while they were still showing the adverts, I placed my hand on your knee. Holding my breath, I ran my palm up, crumpling your dress before it, feeling your warmth beneath my fingers.

How long would you tolerate such covert insertion? How would you respond with so much oversight from surrounding rows? We sat, frozen, until the main feature finally wrenched my attention away.

So now I reflect on what I should do. I am indeed alone here, reflecting forlornly on all the women I have ever slept with. I imagine what it would be like to have you here with me: I have only to ask.

You could be here.

I have only to tell them stories; I have only to give their systems information - my recollections - and by a process of iteration, of trial and error, we could recreate a living, breathing, thoroughly-interacting facsimile of you. Thus I am tempted.

In truth you always were a model in my head.

And perhaps you would surprise me and that would be a joy and almost the entire purpose of your existence, I think.

And perhaps you would look at me with unfeigned affection and unrestrained desire?  

And perhaps you would feel an overpowering need to move closer to me and that we should remove our clothes and lie together - to see how close we could get, and we could press ourselves against each other: our lips, our hands, our breasts, our legs.

And perhaps, quite literally, become one flesh. 

I pause and reflect on the ethics of the thing, always knowing where this is ending up. 

‘Wouldn't that be the entire point of life?’

In Congénies

---

We lived for a while in Congénies, that sun-struck rural town just northeast of Montpellier. Newly married, with two small children, we struggled to know what adult life really meant. 

Our semi-detached house sat near the lake: modern - but suburban and ordinary. I was working long hours; you found in teaching a part-time escape from the drudgery of domesticity.

We needed the money.

We had a kitten - which you doted on - and no idea of preventive care. The fleas took hold, colonising the thick carpet pile of our living room. 

Searching for home remedies, we discovered that our youngest, still in nappies, worked as a kind of flea-magnet. We carried him across the carpet, little black specks leaping eagerly onto him. Then, in the garden, we would scrape them off one by one. 

Eventually, wearying of this pointless, ineffectual ritual, you called in the pest-controllers, who with their cryogenic cylinders put an end to the madness.

There were rare evenings when the roulette wheel of the babysitting circle spun round to us. We would drift down to the market square, past the quiet Quaker house, to the café with music where we'd drink beer in the warm evening air and converse like grown-ups. 

Later we'd stroll back, hand in hand, through the darkening streets, tired, and pleased with each other. 

At the lamppost outside our house I would press you against the iron: une dernière étreinte passionnée, before we re-entered the world of domesticity, duties and diaries.

'On the Beach' - a short story by Adam Carlton

---

Clare at the Beach

This is a story Nigel told me, but of course it is embellished here into a much more interesting memoir, with no more than tangential adjacency to 'the truth' - whatever that is. - AC.

It's the summer of 1978. Clare and I have been married for six months, and we're still in that first bloom. I'm busy working, teaching computer programming - my days are filled with code and students.

Clare is less busy, so one hot afternoon she takes herself off on the train to the seaside north of Liverpool. I say I’ll collect her later. She’ll be wearing that new swimsuit I bought her: ideal for those baking sands.

Later in the day, I finish work, drive north along the Dock Road to the resort promenade. I park up and stroll across the beach to where I see her, wet and dripping, just emerged from the water.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” she replies, basking in the sun and rapidly drying off in that rather small and decorative costume that was my present to her.

“Have you heard of a wet T-shirt competition?” I ask in a neutral tone.

She glares at me.

“It’s something women tend to do, and men tend to appreciate—though of course, we’ve no idea why.”

She glares again, then tilts her head and says suspiciously, “Why are you talking about that?”

I rub my chin thoughtfully.

“You know that costume I bought you? It’s really designed for sunbathing. Not exactly for swimming and getting wet in...”

She looks at me in apparent confusion. “Why?”

I smile. “Well, I could explain here, with all these people watching... or we could go instead back to my Mini. I think my explanation would be a lot more effective there.”

It looks like she hasn’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about; but maybe that’s because she just hasn’t looked at herself. I take her hand and we stroll across the beach towards the promenade. I help her into the back of the Mini (not an easy process in that small two-door car), and we drive a little way to somewhere more secluded.

"Now," I say, "you can see just how unsuitable that outfit is for swimming. A dutiful wife would hand it back to her husband and say that it really doesn't fit the bill.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Such a wife would also say to her husband that it’s rather cold back here - now that she’s given away her costume - and a dutiful husband would, at the very least, climb in back and try to keep her warm.”

“Okay,” she says.

---

There are moments I regret buying a Mini...

'The Girl From IS' - a short story by Adam Carlton

---

The Girl from IS

She remembers when she was ten. She'd written that essay for school. She had populated all the rooms of her home with little animals, each of them with their own personality suited to where they lived. The upstairs squirrels; the downstairs foxes. Each with their own separate characters. And they had had very serious adventures - without their parents’ oversight.

She'd had to be careful with the story because, after all, her house was very large, and she didn't want to boast about it, or even draw attention to it with the other children. Still, the teacher had liked it, and she had gotten a gold star. And now she was home, so proud and ready to show her parents.

Of course, her father would not be there. He was always busy: something in the city which seemed to occupy all his time. And not just during the week, but weekends too. No, she was used to going to places without her father.

Her mother was somewhere in the house. She ran to her mother’s study and waved at her, showing her little book with its bright gold star on the essay page, burbling with excitement. Her mother shushed her: eyes glazed, distracted, dragged away from her files.

And this also was no surprise because her mother was always very busy too. How else could such a nice house be afforded?

Ten years later. She’s twenty. She’s joined the International Socialists, a revolutionary left organization dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. Dedicated to the overthrow of all the things that are making her mummy and her daddy quite rich.

She thought she would find a sense of belonging here. A sense of comradeship; a sense of caring and compassion.

But strangely, it was not to be.

The organization is certainly busy. There’s plenty of busywork: selling newspapers, going to meetings. There’s plenty of discussion if you like reading Lenin and Trotsky and Tony Cliff. And other kinds of political tract. Perhaps Gramsci?

But it’s curiously transactional. She never feels that anybody really cares much about her.

And now she’s been sent by her local party group, her party branch down to this midlands town, where there’s a conference on women’s rights. A medium-sized conference, not too important, and it’s being organized by another organization on the left: the International Marxist Group, the IMG.

She’ll be staying at the house where the IMG comrades live. It's down on Friday afternoon; conference on Saturday. She’s going with a friend, Audrey.

She’s quite jealous of Audrey. Audrey is five foot four, ginger hair, freckles. Very cute, everyone says. Whereas she is five foot ten. Curvaceous, for sure but perhaps a little on the large side for many of the male comrades in the International Socialists. And also, they seem to find her rather earnest. Perhaps there are some other problems there? Ones she doesn’t want to look too closely at?

They find the place. It’s just a walk away from the bus station. They’re welcomed in. There are three of them there: Paul and Will, and another guy.

They sit around and talk a little bit about this and that: the conference, what they’re doing, the university where they all play at studying. And then they show the two of them around the house.

It’s a decaying structure, scheduled for demolition. They got it cheap because it won’t be there much longer. In the back pantry, there are piles and piles of boxes of cheese that they bought for an earlier meeting that nobody ever consumed. They’ve been living on cheese for months now, apparently.

They go into the back garden. There’s a shed there. The guy points to it: that’s where he lives. He lives in a shed.

They look inside. It’s furnished. There’s a double bed, a light, a table, a chair, a heater. A cardboard box used for storing clothes.

They go back inside and the evening progresses.

It’s unspoken, but somehow they’re going to pair up. It’s hard to know where the boys’ fancies lie, because each of them is rather nervously eyeing the two girls, as if trying to decide. But in the end it won’t be their decision.

It’s clear to her that Audrey has her eyes set on Paul: the quiet, earnest Australian with his handsome curls and round glasses, who seems very bluff and honest and has a certain rough charm.

There’s Will, of course: slim, very long hair, rather round face, rather baby-faced really. Seems quite quiet and withdrawn; underpowered.

She’s rather more taken with the third guy. Also slim and long-haired; wears glasses. But he’s much more forthright. Quite calm, quite talkative, quite intellectual, quite wry, quite funny, really. She rather likes that; she finds it endearing.

It becomes later and darker even; the boys start looking around. It’s time to retire. Audrey goes off with Paul and sort of pushes him a little, as if to say: where’s your room?

And she goes off with the confident one. Says: show me your shed.

They walk out to the back garden. It’s quite chilly. There’s even a little frost beginning to settle on the vegetable stumps. A shed is perhaps not the ideal place to spend the night.

They go inside, close the door, the light goes on, the heater is warm - he’s already prepared, he put it on before. It’s not so bad inside the shed. The mattress is on the floor; there’s a duvet on top.

She does not see why any time must be wasted here.

She’s already feeling all the angst she normally has: the loneliness that is her long-term companion. A certain quiet desperation, a hunger for companionship, a hunger for human contact, a connection.

Directly, studiously, without any drama, she takes off her clothes. Takes off her top. Takes off her dress. Shrugs out of her underwear. Throws the duvet to one side. Lies down on the bed, her legs slightly spread. Looks at him.

Looks intently. And waits.

It does not take long in these situations - the very strangeness of it.

A few minutes later she holds him tightly. She needs him. Again. And then once again, before finally...

The light goes out. And they sleep.

And next morning? All that passion - all that excitement, all that closeness, all that completion - it has receded into history; that visceral need surges within her again: it always does.

He’s half asleep. She kneels over him. Straddles him. Her breasts hang heavy over his head. It doesn’t take much.

And they do it twice more.

And he doesn’t know what has happened except that probably he’s been taken over the edge of what he’s physically capable of doing.

About two weeks later, there’s an event in London.

The IMG people, along with many others, are invited to stay at her parents’ mansion.

Her parents are progressive, left-leaning. Not actually members of the International Socialists, but certainly adjacent. And they have no problem at all putting up ten, twenty, thirty comrades - with their sleeping bags - on a Friday night before the event on Saturday.

She has specifically arranged for him to have one of the spare rooms. And so she goes there after dark to invite him to her room. She’s wearing a flimsy nightie. Nothing else.

She takes him by the hand and directs him through the dark corridors of the first floor, stepping over sleeping comrades in their sleeping bags, carefully, quietly, in the gloom, until they get to her room.

And there they make love. Again. And again.

And she feels, for a moment, that connection. The sense of oneness. She’s with another human being in the most tactile way possible. She touches more than herself. She is momentarily comforted. Her inner pain is back in its box - but only during the actual moments of passion.

And now he’s shaking his head in disbelief.

She wants him to stay. But he won’t. He shakes his head again. He gets up. He leaves her. He walks back: back to his own bed.

He looked at her in the gloom, as if he could hardly believe that he’s doing this: rejecting such an opportunity. But he did.

And she? Hurt. Like someone’s taken away a banquet when she’s still hungry, starving. And she doesn’t know what that feeling is, or how it can be stopped, except by making love again.

And that isn’t going to happen.

So she lies there alone and lonely and disappointed in her bed. And he’s gone.

---

There is a strange postscript.

A long time later, maybe six months, maybe a year, she’s in a demonstration, talking to a male friend, walking through London.

And a familiar face. A somewhat familiar face.

He comes across. And she recognizes that young man from the midlands.

And she has no idea what to do about that. She’s moved on. It was an episode. It assuaged her hunger for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days.

But it was another cul-de-sac.

What can he bring to her now?

She blanks. She doesn’t know the language to deal with this. She doesn’t know him, really. She doesn’t know him for the purposes of today.

She looks away.

He looks rueful.

She watches from the corner of her eye; he’s like: what’s that about?

And then he walks away.

And she never sees him again.

---

Depth Theology - posted by Adam Carlton

Spinoza - Nagel's Bat - Jung

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God in the Depths: Theology and the Immanent Unconscious

Abstract

This essay argues for a renewed theology grounded in the irreducibility of consciousness and the symbolic architecture of the psyche. Rejecting both reductive materialism and naïve supernaturalism, it proposes a third path: a theology of the immanent unconscious.

Drawing on the insights of Thomas Nagel, Carl Jung, and Baruch Spinoza, the essay contends that meaning, not mechanism, lies at the heart of the religious impulse. Catholic doctrine, seen through this lens, becomes a symbolic system of deep psychological and moral truth, an archetypal engagement with moral and existential realities.

In recovering the sacred as a depth within and between us, this theology affirms an ontology of God as the structuring mystery of social consciousness, value, and personhood.

It is not an argument for belief, but an invitation to seriousness.

There is a fundamental category error at the heart of contemporary consciousness studies. The prevailing assumption is that if neuroscience were to model every neuronal firing, simulate every synaptic fluctuation, we would thereby explain consciousness. But this is demonstrably false. A complete scientific account of pain does not itself hurt. A full neural description of colour perception does not reveal the redness of red. The map, as always, is not the territory, and consciousness, by its nature, cannot be reduced to its own model.

This is not a trivial epistemological problem. It is an ontological signal. The irreducibility of first-person experience - the raw fact of qualia, the intentionality of thought, the burden of despair, the luminosity of dreams - marks a fault-line in the foundations of physicalism. Philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson have shown that no third-person theory can bridge this explanatory gap.

Consciousness cannot be "naturalised" by data alone.

Yet rejecting reductive materialism solves only half the problem. We must also abandon its opposite: the romantic fiction that consciousness is a sovereign theatre, a sealed chamber where the isolated ego reigns supreme: the Ghost in the Machine. This Enlightenment myth, so foundational to Western individualism, has been decisively undermined by the insights of depth psychology.

The self is not a monad; the psyche is not private property; it is a social ecology.

The Collective Unconscious as Immanent Depth

Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is often misunderstood: dismissed by many scientists as pseudoscience, or embraced by mystics as vague metaphysics. Properly interpreted, it is neither. It names the deep, inherited architecture of human meaning: a transpersonal symbolic grammar manifest in myth, dream, ritual, and art.

Jung called these structural motifs archetypes. They are neither learned nor invented. They are discovered, appearing spontaneously across cultures, pointing to shared psychic necessity rather than cultural contingency.

From this perspective, the psyche is not reducible to a passive canvas nor a neural by-product. It is a symbolic field in which individual life unfolds. Emotions like love, guilt, awe, and loneliness are not reducible to hormones or evolutionary adaptations. They are meaning-events. They refer us to something larger than ourselves. They bind us to the deep structure of collective human life.

And the unconscious, for Jung, is not just a dark attic of repressed thoughts. It is active. Moral. Alive. To live well is to engage it: to confront the shadow, to integrate contradiction, to enter symbolic dialogue with the archetypal forces that shape who we are. In doing so, we do not merely mature into ourselves; we encounter something sacred.

Reframing Spinoza: Substance as Symbolic Matrix

At this point, Spinoza’s metaphysics becomes startlingly relevant. His God is not a personalised cosmic superintendent, but the immanent substance of all that exists - Deus sive Natura. There is no intervention, no miracle, no heaven in the clouds. Only necessity, unfolding eternally. God is, rightly understood, synonymous with physical reality - but one freighted with meaning.

But what if we reframe this vision? Suppose the substance through which Spinoza's God manifests is not mere matter or extension but meaning. Suppose the symbolic structure of the psyche, rather than physical nature, is where Spinoza’s divine immanence is most intimately encountered.

Then the collective unconscious becomes not only a psychological concept, but a theological candidate: a crucible of archetypal reality; the actual matrix through which sacred depth becomes experientially real.

It's important to understand the structure of the argument here. We are not starting from some pre-existing concept of 'God' defined by sacred texts. Those texts - documenting transcendental experience - are part of what must be explained. Instead we are reflecting on the collective-unconscious, present in every human being as a core of empathy, sensitivity to the other and morality.

Everyone experiences these deontological impulses as prior to their own conscious deliberations. This fabric of meaning is, we argue, the true experience of the sacred. The common human experiences of love, mercy, justice, and forgiveness are felt with driving personal immediacy. The form of their meaning is socially shaped by ritual and by the primal archetypes Jung discerned.

We cannot deduce theology from our studies of the empirical. Science and faith are different categories and cannot contradict each other. But just as the experience of consciousness is not reducible to neuroscience, the experience of the sacred in myth and symbol and emotion and motivation retains its autonomy; its cultural expression: theology.

Religion Without Reduction: The Case of Catholicism

At this point a critic may interject: isn’t this just a sophisticated way of saying that religion is "all in our heads"?

Wrong framing. It is a way of saying that what is in our heads is not trivial. The religious imagination, expressed in sacraments, myths, and moral architecture, is far from arbitrary. It encodes truths. Archetypal truths. Catholicism in particular offers a rich symbolic system for the integration of opposites, the confrontation with suffering, and the aspiration to harmony.

The Trinity, the Crucifixion, the Eucharist, the communion of saints: these are not arbitrary propositions. They are psychic enactments of meaning: the reconciliation of the self with the other, the transformation of pain into participation, the moral weight of judgment, the longing for union. They are true not because they are literally factual, but because they are existentially indispensable.

Seen in this light, doctrine is not dogma. It is symbolic theology. It is the language in which human beings, for centuries, have worked out what it means to be fractured, to hope, to love, and to die.

Toward a New Paradigm: The Immanent Unconscious

This theological framing is neither traditional theism nor reductive atheism. It does not posit a God above the world, nor does it dismiss the sacred as superstition. It offers a third way: a theology of the immanent unconscious.

It begins with the irreducibility of conscious experience. It finds in the psyche not solipsism, but interconnection - the symbolic commons in which we are formed. And it finds there, not an argument for belief, but an invitation to depth.

The sacred is not elsewhere. It is here. In dream. In ritual. In the quiet refusal to hate. It is not accessed through proof, but through participation. Not in certainties, but in symbols. Not through control, but through reverence.

The Apophatic Horizon

Yet even this theology must stop before the final mystery. Why does it feel like anything to be? Why is the world not blank, but charged with value?

We do not know.

This unknowing is not failure. It is fidelity to truth. And in this silence, something ancient stirs. The tradition calls it apophatic theology. The refusal to name God in order to honour the fact that God is not a concept we can grasp.

To say God is mystery is not to evade meaning. It is to recognise that ultimate meaning is not grasped, but entered. Not defined, but encountered - in symbol, in suffering, in sacrament. Not as object, but as the very condition for subjectivity.

This is not alien to Catholicism. It is its mystical core.

God is not less real for being mysterious. The sacred is not less binding for being symbolic. What matters is not whether we can explain God. What matters is whether we live in fidelity to the mystery that speaks through us.

Not everything is merely atoms and the void. Meaning matters. And the mystery that calls us to it may still be what we mean by 'God'.

And that, perhaps, is theology enough to begin again.

'Happy Christmas' - a short story by Adam Carlton

 

---

I'm sitting on the cold, hard floor of a corridor, my back roughly braced by a concrete wall. It is as silent as a catacomb. I'm quite alone in this bricked basement passage, which meanders unevenly towards the subterranean kitchen. 

The students on campus have all gone home; I've elected to stay for my own complicated reasons, sitting here, introspecting, struggling to figure out who my actions are hurting, really. 

Just the usual people. 

---

Élisabeth was the biggest part of it, I think. She has to be part of the background to my current estrangement, my refusal here and now to do the right thing.

It was the thing with Élisabeth which had prompted the most egregious round of their moralising, even leading to physical violence. Yes, my father had really lost it there.

"I never touched another woman before your mother," he had shouted as the blows landed on my shoulders, battering my raised, defensive forearms.

Why not hit him back? That would surely have marked the path of no return. Besides, I saw, in part, where the anger was coming from: the despair and emptiness in my father's nasty moralistic little life.

And a little bit of me was surprised: what, my father has never had sex with any other woman?

---

My relationship with Élisabeth came in three phases, the first of which was quite innocuous. I left school a year ago, in December, but was not due to start university until the following September (I have been here at university for four months though it feels like forever).

There had been some discussions of voluntary work overseas but the dates didn't quite work out. Instead I spent the spring and summer in that cold, distant northern town, working as a live-in assistant at a special residential home for disabled kids. These were teens who couldn't do much of anything. I helped  them get dressed, taught them and organised trips. 

On my arrival in January, I had been assigned my own little bedroom at the end of a shiny new corridor (the school was refreshingly modern). Next along was a staff room. And then there was Élisabeth's room, laid out, as I was to discover, just the same as mine. 

I was just eighteen: away from home for the first time, growing my hair, pleased that the school had an electric guitar I could practice on. I was in that pleasant state where everything was new, everything I encountered was for the first time. I had the arrogant self-confidence of the intellectually successful, knew I was going places, though I didn't know quite where. Perhaps I didn't appreciate the effect that would have on a sensitive working-class girl steeped only in the rough, brawling, macho culture of that bleak, impoverished region. 

Élisabeth was petite, perhaps a little on the plump side but blessed with an artless fashion-sense. On our days off she would show me around her home-town. We’d visit discos, funfairs and the freezing seaside. We shopped, frequented cafés and bars and generally hung out. By local standards we were bohemian - exotic creatures in a drab town. 

The kids were the first to notice: "Are you going with her, sir?" 

Élisabeth was not on the road to college. As far as I could tell, she had no useful qualifications whatsoever and no real interest in ideas. Her strengths were her warmth and her capacity for affection, traits which were rapidly focused on me. Élisabeth said she loved me: what she got back were mumbled placeholders. 

The Easter holidays marked the end of phase one of our relationship. We concocted a plan: I would mislead my parents, inform them that term was starting a few days earlier. And I would come up and stay with Élisabeth at the house she shared with her brother. 

It worked. After a long day of connections and delays, my train eventually pulled into town and I made my way to her house (it was late, dark and raining when I arrived). To my frightened bemusement, I was met at the door by the brother. I was struck by his greasy black curly locks before noticing the knife he was waving in his hand. 

I froze in that shadowy hall; Élisabeth appeared and stretched her arm to bar him. The message was clear: I was hers. Urgent words were exchanged,  fragments I could not make out. The young tough backed off and vanished into the dark interior of the house.

The slim, nervous intellectual entered Élisabeth's home. 

That night in her bed: I whispered to her afterwards, "That was my first time." 

She said, "I know." 

---

I look up and down the chilly, deserted corridor. It's still early, I'm not required for half an hour yet. No-one around. I sink my head back between my knees, ignore the numbness in my buttocks and think back six months, to the start of that fateful summer term in the north.

Term began and now we could not keep our hands off each other. At midnight I would stealthily creep along the dimly-lit corridor, tiptoeing past the closed door of the staff-room where the affable night-nurse would be ironing (she of the friendly, knowing look and closed mouth). And now I would arrive, silently turning the handle and slowly easing her door open, slipping into Élisabeth's room - and into her bed.

During those weeks I was - we were - in a bubble of delicious happiness. A bubble bounded by my approaching departure for university - but we never thought about that.

If she was on early shift she might interrupt her rounds to wake me with a cup of tea. Was it so surprising that I would drowsily draw her into my bed? Despite her protestations that she didn't have time, that she had duties to perform, that there were people waiting? Didn't her feeble attempts to stop me make it even more exciting - as her panic was stifled with my kisses and sudden passion, as I thought?

That was her vulnerability, that in her insecurity she could not deny me. And yet somehow we stayed out of trouble. People said nothing - and covered for us. 

The school term ended too soon. During the summer holidays she came down to my home to meet my parents, and see my sights for a change. Phase two: we were still radiant with mutual attraction, each a focus for the other: for her, emotional commitment; for me, a blind, hormonal storm of desire. 

I wonder in retrospect about my father's reaction. Crammed into his small working class house was this extraordinarily ravishing teenage girl with a stunning figure - much of it revealed by her tight blouses and short skirts. Did her very presence affront his outdated morality? Was he secretly jealous of his son's success? Did he even, ludicrously, try to chat her up? 

At the time I did not give it a second thought. I was too busy pooh-poohing my mother’s tentative suggestions of marriage (laughable!). 

Saturday morning I take her on the bus to town, show her the art gallery and the shops. Free from the cramping presence of my parents, we walk hand in hand in the warm sunshine, oblivious to the background hum of traffic, each conscious only of the other. 

On the bus back we're in the front seat of a sparsely occupied top deck, kissing and canoodling. A sturdy woman sitting at a window half way back studies us from behind. I glance back, note with amusement the disapproving curl of her mouth. She  carefully observes my arm around Élisabeth's shoulder, and hears Élisabeth's quiet gasps of pleasure. But inside she surely feels a disquieting warmth, pierced by a stab of fierce jealousy.

We get off half a mile from home, the nearest this bus goes (is that why I chose it?). The track rises across a field and through a line of trees before entering the outskirts of my housing estate. Fifty yards on I whisper, "Shall we do it?" With a nervous smile she lets herself be pulled through long, bleached, tussock grass, over the brow of a small rise. And here it's dotted with small bushes: a small, secluded space of calm. 

She settles gracefully into the grass, arches her back - I  have time to notice how skimpy that cotton is in her hand. And then she offers herself.

Afterwards we get to our feet, tidy up. I pull her close and we hug tightly, dizzy with relieved euphoria. I take her hand and we trudge back to the path, back to the oblivious chastity of my parents’ home. 

A few days later we had an evening out at a city centre disco. It was getting towards last-bus time and I roamed the town centre with her in tow, looking for somewhere, anywhere, private. In the end it was a multi-storey car park, a gap between lonely cars in the dark. She protested but, selfishly consumed with lust, I insisted. And so she complied, lying on her good coat on the gravel with her knickers clenched tight in her hand. 

I wrote to her after she'd returned: crass, indiscreet phrases such as 'missing lying between your legs.' I secreted the letter in my bedroom, waiting for a chance to post it. Which was where my mother duly found it. 

Another mark of my former naivety, I think. That I had taken the issue here as breach of confidence - how dare they read other people's mail! 

My weeping mother and violent father, battering me round the room, bludgeoned me with the bigger picture. 

---

And so the world moved on to autumn, the start of university and the final phase of my tortuous relationship with Élisabeth. Once I was studying I obviously couldn't see Élisabeth at the care-home any more. She moved into a bedsit (I never inquired why) and I hitched up Friday afternoons to spend the weekend with her, returning Sunday afternoon. It's a long way, more than 300 kilometres to the border, hours on the road in both directions. I've forged an intimate relationship with autoroute service stations and the best spots to seek a lift.

Our relationship could not survive without daily closeness and working together. Recently she said to me in dismay, "Can't you get sex at college without having to drag yourself all the way up here?". Another time, she tearfully confessed she had slept with someone else in my absence: sex was especially good after that, I recall with self-disgust.

I was breaking her heart. 

But I took her question literally, as something to ponder. I had grown tired of her neediness and despised her drinking (although when drunk she was tearful and honest and... the sex was intriguing). But the lustre was gone; I had lost interest in Élisabeth. 

It was the week after I’d dumped her - let's say we mutually agreed that things had run their course -when she wrote with her news. I had never given the matter the slightest thought, had always assumed she had made the arrangements. 

'Don't worry,' she wrote, 'I'll make the arrangements.'

I wonder what it took her to write those few, utilitarian lines? 

A few weeks later I got the follow-up: 'It's been done.' 

I recall my interior dialogue just a few weeks ago, edged in barbed shards of guilt: 'I should have gone up and supported her,' I said to myself, 'But we had already broken up, I'd moved on. There was nothing practical I could do. I had nowhere to stay up there and she didn't want to see me again anyway.' 

What a fine collection of excuses! I want to hang my head in shame. And yet my remorse is extraordinarily limited. There is even a consoling sliver of masculine pride: I am potent!

Naturally I have not shared any of this with my parents, I'm telling them nothing these days. 

I have reached the outer limits of my capacity for empathy but… just pause a moment with Élisabeth. What did she think when she met (for the first time?) a guy who seemed to her to be bright, witty and sensitive? Someone who listened to her, treated her (when out of the grip of lust) with some measure of respect?

Surely she was bowled over. I think she suddenly saw another life ahead. Her parents and siblings and neighbours, she thought, need not mark out her destiny. She must have asked herself over and over again: why had it all gone wrong? And in her culture and experience that must have come down to: what had she done wrong? 

Did she ‘make the arrangements’ or did she think that that was the best she was ever likely to get, a gift to be treasured?

---

I've been home once since term began, I hitched down in my usual student garb. I did not completely anticipate my parents’ response to my embrace of late-sixties counterculture. 

My shoulder-length hair, dirty combat jacket, torn jeans and bare feet didn't totally cut it with the neighbours either. There were arguments; voices were raised. 

So it seems idiotic to go back now, to scandalise them further and to have them beat up on me with their old-fashioned, patriarchal thinking. Better to earn some cash here as a temporary kitchen porter, servicing the convention they're hosting over the Christmas holidays. 

Thinking deep thoughts. 

My head jerks to the sound of clanging utensils. Someone is wheeling a trolley full of dirty pots and pans towards the sinks. That's my cue. I trudge, head down, towards the wash-up room. Above the door, someone has outlined a cheery message to staff in gold and silver tinsel. 

Happy Christmas. 

---

‘Asymptotic’ by Adam Carlton

---

I have a visitor this evening. She's sitting on the edge of the bed.

I'm sitting at the side of the room, next to a small table stuffed against the wall. This is where I used to prepare lessons; now I write programs.

But today it's an autumn evening and I'm teaching her maths.

She sits on my bed and looks at me. She's curvaceous, petite with a round face and fine black hair curling onto her shoulders. She's wearing a cardigan over a patterned blouse, pleasantly distorted by her ample breasts. I track down to her short green skirt and black tights…

Still, to business.

I don't really know why she's here. I've given up teaching maths myself, I can make more money with much less stress by programming computers. It's also much more interesting.

But I know she’s taught in the past - both junior school, and secondary maths - so I suppose it's prudent.

If she ever returns to teaching, that is.

Today we're doing the basics of differential calculus. 

I beckon her across, she stands next to me as I sketch the parabola of y = x² in the exercise book.

"We're going to work out the gradient of the curve at some arbitrary point x," I say, remembering when I did this in sixth form with Dr Dickinson, our irascible pure maths teacher. Then it was all epsilon-deltas and rigorous definitions of limits and convergence. Hell, he even had us constructively defining the real numbers - Dedekind’s sections, I vaguely recall.

None of that is going to be mentioned today.

“I hate to see you standing,” I say, “this would work a lot better if you sat here.”

I point to my lap.

Unaccountably she seems to agree: I pull my chair back a bit and she sits across my knees, looking very intently at the diagram.

Her left arm is draped around my neck - for stability of course; the same reason my right arm is curled around her waist.

“So: the concept of gradient,” I say. 

I put my left hand against her shin, halfway between her ankle and knee, feeling smooth, glossy fabric under my fingers.

Here the gradient is steep, I say, running my hand slowly up towards her knees, pushing them slightly up.

My fingers slide over her left knee.

“So here we have what's called a local maximum. See how, just here, my hand is flat, the gradient is zero. But as we move further, we're now descending rather than ascending - the gradient’s turned negative.”

I collide with the hem of her skirt; I push forward so that my palm and fingers curve upon her warm thigh.

“Ok," I say, "That's the basic idea. Differential calculus is just doing the same thing with maths.” 

And so we continue.

She seems to find the lesson useful.

---

---

Another lesson, this time we're doing Taylor series. Again, this is something we did ‘properly’ at school. We cared about error terms and convergence; we looked at pathological functions which lack a Taylor expansion. I'm only recently appreciating how weird it is that infinite sums of polynomials converge to functions which really do look nothing like polynomials. The power of calculus, etc.

As usual, nothing of such deep reality will go into this evening's lesson.

She understands some trig now: sine and cosine. I just about managed to convey the differentiation of sin and cos from first principles. So now we have enough to derive the Taylor series for sine. Of course, I have an idea as to how to make this memorable: the sums of successive terms cumulatively approach the target function - tonight sine seems very appropriate.

She's lying flat on her back on my bed. I'm standing by my table, looking down at her. The room is already darkening, the room illuminated by a bedside table light. 

Tonight she's wearing a white tee shirt, faded blue jeans, and socks. Her head is lying on my pillow, hair curling and sprawling on the pillowcase. She seems confident, relaxed.

I say, “Three terms give us a pretty accurate approximation for sine, up to say 70 degrees; although of course we actually measure the angle in radians.”

I lean over and grasp the fabric of her left sock, at the toes.

“Call this the first term of the Taylor expansion of sin(x),” I say in a professorial manner, “So that would be x itself, a straight line through the origin.” 

With a flourish I pull the sock off.

“But apart from here at the origin," - I tap her now-bare instep - "this is not a terribly good approximation to the whole you.”

I now take the second sock between finger and thumb, and slide it off.

---

---

“The second term,” I say, “x cubed over three factorial, with a minus sign. It's a bit better but still not great.”

I straighten, still in my best tutorial manner, and add:

“A third term will dramatically improve things. We add back x to the fifth over five factorial.” 

I look mock-puzzled: "How are we going to do that?"

She is looking towards the ceiling, listening quietly, not a care in the world. My gaze is drawn by a quick movement at her waist as the stud is released and the zip loosened. She subsides into stillness again.

“Ok,” I say, pulling at the fabric at her ankles, “now we're getting closer to approximating the real you.”

She helps by raising herself as her jeans join her socks in an untidy pile on the floor.

She's very pretty, there on my bed.

“But we only got to seventy degrees,” she says, “Surely we owe it to Mr Taylor to… approximate even more accurately?”

To the faint rustle of fabric, I turn to my notebook, to work out how many extra degrees we get by including the fourth term. It's interesting; we'd go past the right angle to 106 degrees... I turn back.

Her moving hands now enfold the hem of her tee shirt: “Close enough, d'you think?” she murmurs, "Or should we go even further?"

---