‘I thought of us that afternoon in Paris, after we had escaped from the rain. The sun came out and the pavements shone. It was as though the streets had been silvered into a mirror, and we could see the buildings and the statues and our own faces multiplied by the glass pyramid of the Louvre and the smooth flat mirror of the rain.

It was after the flood. The past had been drowned, but we had been saved. In the multiple possibilities of the mirror we could have taken any direction we wanted.

Drops of rain fell from the hems of coats and from the falling weight of your hair. Each one was a complete world, a crystal ball of chance that held our future. Let them fall. There were so many, so many chances, so many futures. When I brushed away the rain from your forehead, aeons broke back into the waters where they were made. We were universes dripping with worlds. All we had to do was choose.

‘Noah must have felt like this.’
‘Soaked?’
‘Free.’

Imagine it.
The floodwaters subside and the ark comes to rest on top of Mount Ararat. The dove returns with an olive branch in her mouth.

Imagine it. Year and years later, the ground is long since dry and fertile, and the boat is still up there, beached on its mountain-top like a memory-point.

I look back on it amazed. I can hardly believe it is there – absurd, impossible, testimony to something that never happens.
But it did happen. It happened to us.’