October 6

I sent on chain mail containing a sickening prayer, sucked in by the promise of being granted a wish and the next day Marcin called Klaus Masannek and got an interview. What can I say? Vomitous New Age magic has its place.

Dreaming holocausts of various dimensions – in one dream I am at a funeral of an old boyfriend, a friend of my sister’s that I lived with when I was twenty two. At that time he was in the opening phases of an addiction to opiates of every possible configuration- heroin, melted down morphine tablets, a revolting concoction made of steeped poppy seeds which caused me to lie on the floor and vomit for several hours when I tried it. A patient, easygoing, precise man with jeweller’s hands that could find their way around an engine in the dead of night, sounding out its convolutions and its ailments without faltering. He had an old Peugeot that started with a crank, an overbearing mother and an attitude to sex that bordered on absolute indifference. Once I watched him inject himself and saw how his quiet hands were shaking so much with the urgency that he could hardly tighten the belt around his bicep- since then he’s fulfilled all his early potential and gone on to become a full-blown junkie, one of that caste of middle aged Australian men drifting in a limbo of substance abuse and emotional incapacitation.

In my dream it was his funeral but he was still alive. People kept arriving until there were hundreds of them and I was the only one crying. Eventually such a festive atmosphere had developed that his mother started selling tickets for $25 a head.

From there to Siberia, where I’m travelling with a strange man in the middle of winter. We argue and separate, and I find myself wandering in a nuclear waste dump- everything is grey, there is no sign of human life, and I am in a state of extreme panic feeling myself getting more and more radioactive by the minute.