My night-time ramble is all whizz and the day-glo stamped ones are doing their stuff; my temples soft as ocean sponge. Then I see it. A glove, its tapered black fingers limp on the road like an amputated hand washed up from Idi Amin’s crocodile river. Not quite the normal article. I bend down to pick it up, examine and sniff within – damp in there, sweaty, a leathery feral smell – feline, definitely female. I try my fingers inside and imagine her slim, exited hand – long ivory fingers, bruise-yellow in the clench-creases – their dark reptilian casing now discarded. Snake shed skin. Now I must go search the far corners of the earth for this pale lady’s hand that once wore the glove, and thence make her my own. Thence? Wrong word surely?
Wrong time, wrong place.