And so it seemed to me that the tin Magdalen was not repenting but reliving – the feel of a man's hairy skin and the look of his shapely, dead bones. Because Bennett's touch was sweet as death to me. And oh! Death is sweet when you are fourteen.

I ran to that room. Sometimes I went ahead of the appointed time and the waiting was terrible. It makes me tired to think of it. There was no clock. I could hear the people on the street and, sometimes, the singing class I was missing in Mme Hubert's school for girls. I sat on the bed and faced the door, pressing my feet down hard to stop the trembling. What opened, as the door opened, over and over in my head, was not my legs, or as you might say, my sex. What opened was my stomach and my heart – the flesh you might see on any butcher's block melted into one swooping movement of the soul that yearned over and over again for the opening of that door.

He always looked different and small when the latch clicked up. But that is as you might expect.

This is not yet love, I thought, as Mr Bennett checked about him (though the room was always empty) and then looked over to me, and smiled.

He was kind enough, I have to say, and allowed my curiosity to lead the way. I was very intrigued by the sight of his member, a dull, blushing pink, ticking idly upwards – for the first many times he let me play with it only, to get the cushioned heft of it; its buoyant weight and its ugly, weeping eye. Then, when he entered me and rolled his eyeballs back, I thought I had killed him, which made me frightened and compliant for a week or more. And when I got the trick of it, I did not let it show.

I was waiting for the moment that everything would turn – because somewhere in my fourteen-year-old heart I knew that he was on the brink of it; of some devastation.

And I was right.

I think about it sometimes – the agonies of men in private rooms. I think of the men who would be torn apart by it, the men who would want you to cut their throat, or press into their eye sockets with your thumbs.

There are men who whimper and trick about like babies, as any woman who has worked on her back well knows. I have seen a duke wag his bottom and pant like a dog, and any number of wealthy men giggle and whine. But these things do not interest me. What interests me is that high, lonely moment when you know that you might kill a man and he would only beg to be killed again. And it was the longing for this moment that made me run to that room in Bordeaux.

And so, after a month perhaps, it turned. And here is Mr Bennett weeping on the floor. And here am I, a young girl looking at the far wall, and I am thinking, Now! Now, this is love. And every day I run down the street to sit on the bed and wait to love again. And I take from him, in twenty-one days, the sum of one thousand and seventeen pounds.

One night around that time, I woke to my teacher, Miss Miller, sitting on my bed. At least, I heard the whispering of her dress and felt the dreadful sag of the mattress in the dark. I could make nothing out, and when her hand came forward to touch my hair I ducked and would have cried out but,

'It's only me,' she said.

She sat for a while, then,

'Are you frightened?' she said. I did not reply, and after some moments the mattress lifted and she was gone. I started to laugh. I knew what she was asking – she wanted to know if I was frightened, not of the man, nor of the future (nor even of her own ghostly figure in the dark), but of the act itself. Miss Miller wanted to know what it was like to know a man. This was the mystery that had, in its insinuating way, ruined her entire life. She was so reduced by it that she had to creep into a girl's room at night and touch her hair.

The next morning I woke, and put that same hair into forbidden curls with Jeanette Blanchot's tongs. I walked the passageways and went from one room to another, smiling and free. I had already finished. I was already gone.

Still, I have a horror of bed-ghosts, the ones who make your mattress dip, so all you feel is a weakening – the sense, in your sleep, of something giving way. I am frightened of all things that make you tip in your sleep, so that when you dream it is of falling. These days, I am so big I cannot lie on my own front. If I lie on my back I feel a choking ghost in my sleep. So I stay on my side, crooked around my belly, as my dear friend's child is crooked in me. I would like him to lie crooked around us both, but he cannot stay close. He frets and wakes, then goes over to his hamacato swing and snore.

What was that thing I wanted to say about love? I wanted to say something about the moment when necessity turns to love – because I felt always the tug of my father's three hundred pounds. But still – ask any wife – there is always a moment when necessity turns to love.

He does not know how cruel I am. He weeps against my belly – because we have buried a man today, perhaps, or because he is going home, or because he loves me, I cannot tell. I stroke his hair when he is asleep, and he can not feel it.

Today was Christmas Day. Tomorrow the Feast of St Stephen.

This morning, all washed by a night of tears, my dear friend says into the stillness,

Ί killed a man, once.'

Only one?' I say.

He and his brothers, drunk one night, tied the man to their horses' tails and hullooed through Asuncion. They left shreds of him on the street. You could see the white of his bones sticking out of his raggedy back.

'But it is not the fact or the flesh of it,' he says. 'It is the why.'

'Then – why?' I say, careful not to look at him.

'Why not?' and he gives a painful laugh. Ί don't know. A woman turned me down for him – a not very attractive woman – and it wasn't that either. It was a thing we had to do. The girl was nothing: Carmencita Cordai. She thought her father owned the town, which he did not.'

Or not any more, I think, and say nothing.

'But the man certainly died. I turned him over and saw his eyes empty. I thought I would be sucked into them.'

'And were you?'

'No. Not in the least.' He sounds disappointed.

'So?' I say, and my breath is so caught in my chest I have to slip the word out by subterfuge.

'"Sof" he laughs. 'It was my first truly dead thing. And it changed the whole world.'

We lie there for some time, watching, each of us, the sun-splattered water as it dances on the ceiling, and I want to touch him with the bare tips of my fingers, or with my lips that are all alive, now, with the thought of touching him. I want to touch him where the skin is thinnest so I might drink it out of him, lick it like sweat – a prickling that comes to my mouth from the thought of what lies inside this man.

If I had killed the sailor, say, instead of mopping his brow, would I be so much the stronger? Would I walk upright? Instead of creeping about at midnight to get my fill of him? I might, instead, just live. Just breathe. Because my chest is tighter and tighter, now. It is closing up as my belly balloons, and I cannot fill myself any more, not with food nor even with air. These dainty, quick breaths I must take. This prison.

Lopez stands at the end of the bed and, taking my foot, he lifts it high to place it flat against his heart.

'So, ask.'

'Ask what?'

'Carmencita. "Was she pretty?" or "Do you love her still?'"

I turn my face away.

'What way did the world change?' I say. 'Was the sky more blue?'

'Yes.'

'More full of birds?'

'Definitely.'

'Was the grass sweeter?'

'And so on. And so forth.'

I do not know what we are talking about, now. But it is enormous good fun, of a sudden, and not about death at all.

My sister in Mallow would bring me to things that she was too squeamish to kill; childish things; a frog or a daddy-long-legs, and I would dispatch them, and it would make her cry. And then later, of course, some blurted telltale, and the horrified face of my Mama, the two of them clinging to each other as they watch me walk towards Hell-fire. She always was a silly thing, my sister. She ran off with a visiting piano player and decided to call it 'marriage'. Let her call it what she likes.