We'll call them Frida and Kahlo!

Who do you see in this picture?

Listening to - 99.9 F - Suzanne Vega

I finally finished Money this weekend and by coincidence, it was mentioned in the next book I read as having only one semicolon - something about which Martin Amis was more than usually smug about - author's words not mine and maybe not quite hers exactly. I was going to read Wintering but I though I ought to finish Eats Shoots and Leaves first, hence the semicolon stuff. I don't remember the semicolon in Money. Reliance on Cliché? Ha! Never.

A child hangs at an angle against the rain-blasted gatepost of the garden to her house. This is a small rural farm in some state of abandonment but she lives there and likes living there. The afternoon is warm though the sky is not entirely clear. The image flows, becomes a broken scene for seconds and the girl's first words are lost in the staticky crackle of the failed tape on which it is stored. We have an idea that this is a country place, the fields stretch away to the limit of our sight, but there are the sounds of engines and technology mixed in with the birds and wind and almost-sea of the shaking trees. The white noise of the billowing woods fades in and out to make all speech a patchwork. I lie in the shade of the edge of the nearest field, not quite with a piece of straw in my mouth but it would not look odd if I had. What is my accent in this place? I have that guttural, dolty sound that divides the town from the country with such ease. You must think I dream of tractors and ploughs and not having to get up early to do the milking. But my house is the centre of the future, the blazing heart of a revolution in thinking that will overturn the very way you see the world. Or so I heard someone say. My sister calls me again and I stand and wave as coolly as is possible when you are my age. She shrugs and turns to go in. I have rhymes and the secret of something in my head; talking to her will only make me lose this and then we will fight. She fights better than I do and I daren't hit her; she is a girl after all and she is the one with all the ideas.