I take photos to document W.'s house. I photograph the wide entrance hall and the stairs to the next floor. I photograph the ground floor living room, with its internal shutters over the windows and its marble fireplace. I photograph the CDs lined up alphabetically on the shelf, and the pile of CDs without covers by the ghetto blaster.
I photograph full ashtrays and discarded Emmenthal packets. I photograph the great kitchen where sometimes we dance, sliding on our socks, and the tiny toilet on the ground floor, with pictures of W. and Sal's friends. I always ask why there isn't a picture of me there, but they never reply.
Upstairs, I document the great living room in a series of photos which, laid edge to edge, would give the whole panorama: the wide floorboards and the high old skirting board. The high windows, newly restored. The king sized fireplace ...
It's here we come to listen to Jandek, W. and I. It's here, late at night, that I make him listen in silence to Khartoum and Khartoum Variations. W. finds Jandek very disturbing, and needs me in the room to listen to it with him. Sal never stays for Jandek. - 'I hate fucking Jandek', she says. 'Don't play him while I'm in the house', she says.
I document the great bathroom, too - the greatest of bathrooms, we're all agreed. The lion-footed bath on a raised plinth. The generosity of the airing cupboard, with its many towels. The copies of Uncut by the toilet. The stained glass window.
It's indescribably horrifying to W., the thought of leaving his house. But he'll have to leave it, he's knows that. They'll sack him. They'll drive him out of his city.
Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.'s office. His bookshelves - not too many, since W. gives away most of his books ('I don't hoard them, like you', he says), but all the essentials. His Hebrew dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His row of Rosenzweigs.
This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. folds out the sofabed and dresses it. He draws the curtains and makes it look homely. He has to fumigate the room after I live, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship. How does he do that? He opens a volume of Cohen, W. says, and says my name backwards three times.
Then, finally, W. and Sal's room, calm, generous and large windowed. This is where he recovers from his days of scholarship, W. says. It's where he wakes up, before dawn, ready for his studies.
'Compare this house to your flat', W. says. 'What does it make your feel?' I'm a failure, W. says, but then so's he. These are his last days in his house, he knows it. His last days ... he feels it in the air, as animals sense a storm. It's building up out there, W. says, it's massing, like the stormclouds over Plymouth Sound.
They'll turn him from his house, and from the temple of his scholarship. He'll have to wander the streets like a rat. - 'They'll turn us all out', W. says, 'even you'. I'll have to stagger out from my pit. They'll prise me out like a grub, W. says. They'll put out my eyes with sticks, just as they'll deafen him with sticks.