Jeanette Winterson: The PowerBook

It was evening. The air like a kiss.

I was sitting on a low wall opposite the Quisisana. The paparazzi were joking with one another. A man with an acordion was playing on a balcony to a party of Japanese. I had been sitting for a couple of hours, carefully concealed behind my Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, frames thin as the slit in a burka. I had not intended to be fashionable, merely I had bought my sunglasses in Italy, which amounts to the same thing.

I was typing on my laptop, trying to move this story on, trying to avoid endings, trying to collide the real and the imaginary worlds, trying to be sure which is which.

The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room. I can hear voices on the other side, running water, the clink of bottles, the sound of a door opening and closing. When I get up and go out into the corridor, everything is silent, no one is there. Then, as soon as I know the geography of what isn't and what is, a chair scrapes in the room beyond the wall and a woman's voice says, ‘You don't understand, do you?’