Read by Max Berendt
We are in Bar Italia in Soho, and she is schmoozing everybody already — not just the staff, who know everything that goes on in the area and tell her most of it, but the customers too. As I go to collect our drinks from the counter, she swivels her hennaed head, taking in the whole narrow room and most of the street, nodding to a few friends and local celebrities. Marta chose the place and time herself and turned up, predictably, half an hour late. But that’s a star’s prerogative, and she is, in her own way, a star. She greeted me, when she eventually arrived, with an ironic smile.
‘Here is the Muse’ she said, and sat down.
I tentatively ask her to elaborate on her statement about writers when I get back — after all, I’m one myself, with aspirations to fiction, and I may not want to hear this. She rolls her eyes and laughs.