Kathleen - Kathleen? While the surname remains lacking, forgotten, the quiet indeterminance of the life I associate with the full name seems to confirm it as something that has, after all, been grasped somewhere as an idea. The mass of black hair, slightly curled; the sensitive, sober face that it frames. The only tangible memory I have is of that lanky pale-skinned girl behind a counter in the darkness of her father's electrical store, perhaps drawing back into the sparsely furnished apartment that must have lain beyond it. It seems hard to imagine she had ever spoken, but now, while I cannot recall the words, I do remember the soft, abstracted voice within which they took definition, so that even as she spoke, it might have been anyone who was speaking. And then I remember borrowing pencils and pens, rulers and erasers, scissors and sellotape. Each had its shop-scent, neither chewed, scratched, nor even worn-down. They remained implements which would not characterize or involve her, the material collateral of an existence which seemed to me even then to lack any clear distinguishing sign. Striking as she was, idle hands never thought to commemorate her in the fretwork of the desks, since there was no part of her which they could grasp - no perfume, no allegiance, no mannerisms, not even the morbidity of a hung head, or the secret sensuality of tears. Recalcitrant without the promise of enigma, open with the bluntness of the blackboard, the tarnish upon tin cups, she remains one among many half-formed thoughts that return, without any other purpose than to remind us that they have once been thought, and that their moment has not ended, simply because it never really began.

Ushered in by her, other memories from that time return: varnish-hardened brushes, brown flowers in the art-room, black paint upon the Victorian guttering, the dusty playground, the smell of old soap and oilskins in the cloakrooms; Kathleen and the phantoms that embody her are born again in the Lenten fatigue of class attendance, the undifferentiated stream of pre-summer days, the tiredness of late afternoon and the numbing distance of an ash-strip through a clean-cut field of grass, beyond which a bridge mounts the solitude of the river and descends into the smell of creosote among the overgrown allotments - memories that are haunting because they seem like symbols turned back upon themselves - hierophanies, as Eliade calls them, - simultaneous acts and non-acts that sign themselves, like a weary stream of penitents accepting one by one the same pen with which they will write their name, and receive a small brown envelope in return, beside the rusty palings about the Norman church.

Throughout my life, I have felt haunted by the thought of arbitrary, unforthcoming lives; I have felt haunted by them because to me the human life must be the centre, the very definition of meaning; and therefore the possibility that some particular life might be both human and lacking in meaning is a contradiction that puts the concept of meaning itself into question. At the same time, the less directed lives seem to stretch the further, although this may be my prejudice, and maybe it’s simply that I don’t want to know that I could know them; I don’t want to take that mystery from them; and, taking nothing, I know that in the future I can always seek it, there. But, for myself, the opposite motion takes place, and I have always felt oppressed by the meaning I assume in despite of myself; I have always felt I have to shake off the patterns into which my life is forever falling, since none of them are right, and I should never care to be characterised by anything I do. Thus to attain the arbitrary, to be overlooked by others and to overlook oneself – this, to me, is a different and purer kind of meaning, since, within it, the autonomy that resists the world is broken down, and every species of unknown and unexplored potential can grow there in its place.

The room was almost entirely dark; the curtains were open; it was New Year's Eve, nineteen eighty four. Sidsel came into the room and stood in the doorway. She was the girl who was always there; she smelt of carpets and the warmth under the stairs; because I didn’t dare to kiss her, I would chase her about the garden and throw things at her, or pretend to put spiders in her hair, but they were usually just twigs or leaves, so that I had an excuse to make her stand still while I took them out again.

Abruptly my hands stopped in mid cadence. Go on, she said, it’s very good, your playing. But I had staged all this, and perhaps I had staged it too well – the way I had piously left the party to enter this gloomy front room away from the record player and the bottles of cider, but not so far away that I couldn’t be heard at all. Why had I done this? Simply so that I could declare that it was no good, stand up and walk away from the piano, walk rudely past her. To have a portrait, of which I now feel guilty, of her standing there, confused. Perhaps I hoped that this show of passion might awaken something decisive in her; perhaps I was hoping that she would call me back. Instead, within a few months, her schizophrenia had become so bad that they put her in a hospital, and I didn’t see her again.

In a way, like Kathleen herself, she is the enduring portrait of ne pas conclure, a girl whose life, as Nabokov puts it, "hopelessly claims a belated something - compassion, understanding, no matter what - which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem."