The arrangement becomes a regular one: every week Serge hands over to Barney the fruit of Versoie’s trees and beehives, Barney hands over the goods, and sister roils and courses through his veins. Out on parole, he’ll sit among the scrub, his mind at once perfectly replete and empty. Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gorse curls around this forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more then a stuffed dummy…
- from C, Tom McCarthy
