An excerpt:
The peep-show proprietor was blind and lame but he certainly knew his way about the town and led me unerringly to a small bar so deep inside the fisherman's quarter the streets no longer bothered to keep up appearances and relapsed thankfully into slumminess. We sat down at a marble topped table and, without waiting for our order, a black brought us two glasses of the crude spirit that passes for brandy among the poor. He left the bottle on the table. The peep-show proprietor emptied his glass at a draught.
'The purpose of my display,' he remarked, is to demonstrate the difference between saying and showing. Signs speak. Pictures show.'
I filled up his glass again for him and he thanked me by leaning across the table and comprehensively stroking my face with his gnarled finger-tips, as if learning my dimensions before sculpting me.
'Who sent you?' he asked abruptly.
ooo
"Is not this whole world an illusion?
And yet it fools everybody."
Angela Carter
