Black Bazaar

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Four months have come and gone since my partner ran off with our daughter and the Hybrid, this African drummer in a group nobody’s ever heard of in France, and that’s including in Corsica and Monaco. I’m trying to move out of this place, you see. I’ve had all I can take of my neighbour, Mr Hippocratic, he’s always giving me a hard time, he spies on me when I take the rubbish down to the basement and he lays the blame for all the evils on earth at my door. And another thing, I keep thinking I can make out the figures of my ex and the Hybrid stalking me at home. It’s not like I haven’t cleaned the studio from top to bottom, or painted the walls yellow instead of the sky blue that was there before. So there’s nothing left to remind me that a woman and child used to live here too. Except for the shoe that my partner must have forgotten in her rush. I guess she was worrying I might be back at any moment that day and that I’d catch her packing when I was just enjoying my Pelfort over at Jip’s. Finding that shoe was partly thanks to a tip-off from one of my pals at Jip’s, Paul from the big Congo. He’d confided in me over a couple of beers that when a woman leaves you’ve absolutely got to move your bed in order to draw a line under your past life and steer clear of nightmares involving small men who will haunt you and curse you. He was right. Sure enough, for seven nights after my ex left I had plenty of nightmares. I jumped off the Great Wall of China into thin air. I had wings, I could soar so high, I flew more than ten thousand kilometres in a few seconds, then I landed on a mountain peak ten times higher than the Himalayas and twenty-five times higher than our mountains in the Mayombe Forest. The pygmies of Gabon were circling me with their poisoned assegais.

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