Knowing myself, I know how easy it is to hide things from others. My head is a black box, I can say one thing and mean another, or I can speak the truth and allow a little from the box to run out of my mouth. Even though I know this, I keep on asking, "What are you thinking of?" insistently, as though my voice could force its way into your black box and extract the secret material that now, just now, is moving to and fro in it. As though there weren’t a thousand things moving to and fro at the same time. As though I could expect a comprehensive account; and openness. Of course, sometimes I can – a certain openness. But I can never be sure, as I know from how I am. Now I hear you object: "As though everyone were like you."

But I see us both going about with one of those black boxes mounted on our necks, prey to each other’s secrecy.

"What are you thinking now?"

It smells in here of poultry and the parsley I’m holding in my hand. You reply that you’re not thinking of anything in particular, that your thoughts are diffuse, that you’re sleepy; you don’t know me well enough to realise that I often ask; I haven’t asked you all that many times yet.

We’re standing in the warm barn with our faces close to-gether, and your face is overflowing with love, I grow confused and see others I’ve loved; for a moment I think you are like my grandfather, you have the same heavy mouth; and then a boy many years ago, for a second I actually think you are an older embodiment of him. Then comes the consolation, it’s quite simple: you can’t see yourself, but I can, a lot of what you show in your face is hidden to you and quite obvious to me, you don’t know that agitation makes your face – well, as though you were stringing living organisms on a blade of straw; that this love in the barn dissolves it into naked and pure and simple love so it could belong not to just anyone, but to several people I’ve loved and have been loved by in return, your features become indistinct.

We leave the barn and walk across to the car in the courtyard to go for a drive. The cats are lying up against the wheels, and there are kittens under the car. You get in and start the motor, but that doesn’t frighten the kittens, rather the contrary, and neither does it do any good when you sound the horn and race the motor; there are still more under the car now, and I kneel down and get the exhaust in my face and pull at a kitten that is clinging to the rear wheel. I crawl around the car and put my body far under it and pull the scrawny animals out and put them down a good way from us. Then I get in beside you. I’m sure it’s all clear under the car. I brush off my knees and kiss you. We can go now. When we’re a little way from the house you turn to me and say that while I was crawling round under the car you had an urge to kill me with the car, those were your thoughts, and now you’ve told me. You wanted to kill me.

"But I can’t both destroy you and have you," you added.

I know I had wondered what I looked like down on my knees, I knew my skirt was tight and wondered whether you wanted me, and thought how warm and suffocating the ex-haust was. Only now, afterwards, do I think of the sun, that it came surging towards me, and of course I had wondered whether the kittens would run back again, how terrible it would be to injure one, to leave a crushed body behind on the courtyard, a head in a pool of blood.

I fell silent, I had nothing to contribute, I felt dull, there was no go in me. I thought about what you had thought, and I was close to tears. Then I said I was surprised that people didn’t use cars more often to murder each other, chase each other down roads, a running body finally splattered against a wall. Then I wanted you, it ran right through me. You were carrying all those thoughts I didn’t know. I was almost swept over towards you.

"What would you have done?"

"I sat hoping that you would crawl further in behind the nearside front wheel," you said, "and I would have backed."

Quite calmly.

"I would have backed."

Then I would have been run over by the front wheel. I would hardly have died. I would have been crippled.

I’m telling this to you, you who know almost all of it.

You told me you’d got as far as imagining me being taken to hospital – and you thought, too, that at worst I would have been injured a little – and wouldn’t want you anymore.

"I suppose you wouldn’t want someone who had done that to you."

No, I probably wouldn’t.

I have my doubts. Because it’s you.

Later, when we had got home and parked the car again without killing any cats – for the car attracted them, as soon as they heard it on the gravel track, they came rushing out and rubbed themselves against it, of course it’s said that motors purr, and when it was parked they jumped up on the bonnet or settled down close together up against the tyres as though there weren’t mother enough anywhere. They were massively present like an eternal risk of doing damage; I don’t know how many times I managed to tread on one of them. And their desire for company was colossal; when we went for a walk, they followed us, forming a long row, two mothers and ten young, we had a whole train of cats behind us, a peaceful army, but you didn’t like it. When we opened the door to the house, they threw themselves at it, they actually crawled up the door and clung to it and looked in through the window in it; there was always a tiny triangular face hanging there, black or grey. Later, when we had forced our way past the cats into the house and were standing under the shower with the water between us and faces completely wet, I asked if you also thought that I looked different all the time.

"You change a lot. Sometimes your mouth is so soft and wide that it almost fills your whole face when you smile. When I met you, it just looked like a thin line."

Yes, it was disappearing. Now it has come back. My mouth has come back.

"And it can still turn into a thin line. Sometimes you look so haggard and crushed here."

You stretched a hand through the water and stroked me under the eyes with the back of your hand. I love that. The back of one’s hand is so alien because it’s so rarely used, most often it’s only seen. The palm and the fingers are always in use.

"And then you can look like a French actress."

"When I have my big sunglasses on?"

"It’s when you’re most beautiful that I want to kill you. When you’re lying with your head back and I can see your front teeth."

I asked whether it disconcerted you that I changed all the time like that, but it didn’t. But it disconcerts me – with you. I hope things will improve when I meet your cousins and your father and your brother and your mother, when I see some people you resemble just a little, so I can see that you come from somewhere, that you’ve arisen from something that is not me: those I have known and all my passion. I’m looking forward to stopping inventing you.

"Oh," a whole school of thought objects, "but it’s a given that we love on the basis of images, we don’t see each other."

But those are images of desire. What I’m talking about is something different – the entire host of faces that pass across yours and confuse me; for where am I in time – am I now a child with my grandfather, am I a little girl, – "my dear little thing" you say when I’m upset – or now seventeen years old with my first love.

"I wish I had never known anyone else."

Then there would be only the family to fight; my grandfather and consorts from the black box.