As John Lennon sings the words to Imagine, I crawl beneath that mythical piano of his, stroking Yoko’s ankles. She has lovely, slender ankles. They’re like twigs. Sticking out my tongue, I taste the bony flesh covering her right ankle in particular. The taste reminds me of the ginger biscuits I purchased last Friday from Tesco Express at two in the morning, drunk on cheap wine and ghosts while aching for the hit of cigar smoke on my already tired lungs. Does Yoko eat the yolk of the eggs she eats? Did John eat her yolk? If so, how much of her did he swallow, and when he was shot to death outside the Dakota, did her juices flow through his bullet holes, ready to taste the gentle moonlight as it shone on them from above? I remember when it happened. I wasn’t born, but I remember it well. Chapter 23. Misogyny. Hookers in hotel rooms counting down the seconds on the clock as the weather report on the TV promises weather that will never come. I don’t ever come, either, unless I’m thinking of you, and how the rain on your chin is like a fine wine as we stand in the street watching the fireworks explode over the football ground that houses a team we’ll never see nor care about. As John plays those majestic keys, we all so love, his toes wiggle in a pair of sandals purchased from a store in Chelsea. Syd Barrett once shopped in the same store a few years beforehand. Walking around with sand in his hair in the days following his slow descent, his sunburnt skin shed upon the finest cashmere known to man on some tropical beach where a woman with no name bathed in the nude. To serenade her, he played a guitar with no strings. I play no guitar at all. All I have to my name is my confused love for you and a pocketful of imaginary numbers that add up to nothing at all.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US