She invented the mobile phone because no-one else seemed to be getting around to it. She even confessed her eternal gratitude to past influences, but they would not free her. Doesn’t acting, good acting, mean dismantling the personality to see how it works? Of course, you have to be able to put it all back, and that’s the difficult part, like knowing just when to step out in an x-coloured coat or y-coloured shoes and sparkle for the cameras. Sometimes her eyes have that crazy look horses have close-up, and her good looks are the doomed good looks of European Jewry, thick-skinned and lumpy. Did she lose her beautiful dreams, become habituated to failure, sit in her apartment watching the objects stare back? Maybe there’s a back-story with friends and pets and not entirely unsuccessful cosmetic surgery. A towel-turban and shades speaking German to eternity.

Copyright © C.J. Allen, 2007.

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C.J. Allen lives in Nottingham, and has been widely published in magazines and has been broadcast on the BBC. A prize-winner in several competitions, he has four collections, the most recent of which is A Strange Arrangement: New & Selected Poems (Leafe Press, Nottingham, 2006).