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The thought did not cross my mind.

I remember asking John, after Dusklands, what new project he had on the go. His answer was vague. 'There is always something or other I am working on,' he said. 'If I yielded to the seduction of not working, what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.'

That surprised me – his need to write, I mean. I knew hardly anything about his habits, about how he spent his time, but he had never struck me as an obsessive worker.

'Do you mean that?' I said.

'I get depressed if I am not writing,' he replied.

'Then why the endless house repairs?' I said. 'You could pay someone else to do the repairs, and devote the time you saved to writing.'

'You don't understand,' he said. 'Even if I had the money to employ a builder, which I don't, I would still feel the need to spend X hours a day digging in the garden or moving rocks or mixing concrete.' And he launched into another of his speeches about the need to overthrow the taboo on manual labour.

I wondered whether there might not be some criticism of myself hanging in the air: that the paid labour of my black domestic set me free to have idle affairs with strange men, for instance. But I let it pass. 'Well,' I said, 'you certainly don't understand economics. The first principle of economics is that if we all insisted on spinning our own thread and milking our own cows rather than employing other people to do it for us, we would be stuck for ever in the Stone Age. That is why we have invented an economy based on exchange, which has in turn made possible our long history of material progress. You pay someone else to lay the concrete, and in exchange you get the time to write the book that will justify your leisure and give meaning to your life. That may even give meaning to the life of the workman laying the concrete for you. So that we all prosper.'

'Do you really believe that?' he said.'That books give meaning to our lives?'

'Yes.' I said. 'A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. What else should it be?'

'A gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality.'

'No one is immortal. Books are not immortal. The entire globe on which we stand is going to be sucked into the sun and burnt to a cinder. After which the universe itself will implode and disappear down a black hole. Nothing is going to survive, not me, not you, and certainly not minority-interest books about imaginary frontiersmen in eighteenth-century South Africa.'

'I didn't mean immortal in the sense of existing outside time. I mean surviving beyond one's physical demise.'

'You want people to read you after you are dead?'

'It affords me some consolation to cling to that prospect.'

'Even if you won't be around to witness it?'

'Even if I won't be around to witness it.'

'But why should the people of the future bother to read the book you write if it doesn't speak to them, if it doesn't help them find meaning in their lives?'

'Perhaps they will still like to read books that are well written.'

'That's silly. It's like saying that if I build a good enough gramradio then people will still be using it in the twenty-fifth century. But they won't. Because gram-radios, however well made, will be obsolete by then. They won't speak to twenty-fifth-century people.'

'Perhaps in the twenty-fifth century there will still be a minority curious to hear what a late-twentieth-century gramradio sounded like.'

'Collectors. Hobbyists. Is that how you intend to spend your life: sitting at your desk handcrafting an object that might or might not be preserved as a curiosity?'

He shrugged. 'Have you a better idea?'

You think I am showing off. I can see that. You think I make up dialogue to show how smart I am. But that is how they were at times, conversations between John and myself. They were fun. I enjoyed them; I missed them afterwards, after I stopped seeing him. In fact our conversations