I sat down to write a poem based on this idea but before I knew what was happening I’d created an actual imaginary boyfriend for myself, like the imaginary friends children sometimes have.

For quite a while the poem was called ‘My Imaginary Boyfriend’.  It already had the line ‘he has no second name’ and I was walking past the Houses of Parliament on my way to work when it dawned on me that the title of the poem needed to be my imaginary boyfriend’s first name and that his name was Stanley.

Stanley

Yesterday evening I finished
with my imaginary boyfriend.
He knew what I was going to say
before I said it which was top of my list
of reasons why we should end it.

My other reasons were as follows:
he always does exactly what I tell him;
nothing in our relationship has ever surprised me;
he has no second name.

He took it very well
all things considered.
He told me I was to think of him
as a friend and if I ever need him
I know where he is.

[Lorraine Mariner’s collection, Furniture, will be published by Picador in April 2009]

That moment has now arrived, thanks to this piece from Organ Grinder on the Guardian website, in which Jane Tranter, the BBC’s controller of fiction, is quoted as saying that television has now supplanted the novel as ‘the narrative of our times that gives our lives meaning and shape’. The blog post asks whether television drama should be taken as seriously as other forms of ‘high art’ and the predictable comments box debate has ensued, with some people gushing about the Shakespearean qualities of the Sopranos, whilst others say that ‘TV drama is simplistic drivel’ or that the BBC version of Cranford didn’t seriously enrich their lives.

It’s actually quite straightforward. Great novels do enrich our lives and so does great television. Bad novels don’t and nor does bad television. The BBC serialisation of Cranford – pleasant though it was – didn’t enrich my life, but that is equally true of many mediocre novels I’ve read. The Wire has enriched my life, as have many other brilliant TV drama series. Whether The Wire is ‘the narrative of my times that gives my life meaning and shape’ is more questionable, and I’m not really sure what that means anyway. What is true is that many modern TV drama series do demonstrate a complexity more traditionally associated with literature, and which was lacking from a lot of earlier TV drama (and is sadly still lacking from most British TV drama, including from the BBC).

Apropos all of this, what continues to surprise me is how many people in the publishing world either proudly admit to not having a television, or are slightly apologetic about watching television; I’ve more than once heard a colleague say ‘I do have a television but I only use it to watch a few DVDs’ and they then go on to list some appropriately worthy DVDs that they watch on their otherwise inactive telly. If we assume that publishers have any kind of duty to be culturally informed, why is this kind of admission made with such pride? Would it be equally acceptable for a group of television executives to sit around in meetings proclaiming that they try their very best not to read any books?

So if more brilliant TV drama is being made, then that’s great. And I’m as up for a bit of Sopranos/Shakespeare comparison as the next person. But I do wonder why, in certain 'highbrow' circles, it’s only considered acceptable to say you enjoy watching television if it can be passed off as ‘almost like reading a book’.

[Jenny Geras works at Picador]

We’re all unreliable narrators. We can’t help it. We can’t be any other way. Whether we exaggerate a little to keep the attention of our audience or whether we hold something back, we can only narrate from inside our own unreliable minds. We all have needs. We all have blind spots.

I’ve always been suspicious of the term though. To me ‘unreliable’ suggests a narrator who can’t be bothered to show up till Chapter 8 and then has forgotten what the story was supposed to be about so heads for the pub. ‘Unreliable’ narrators may be deluded, scheming or twisted. We might not like or trust them. Yet they may just as easily be playful, naïve, repressed or just shy.  They can be painstakingly honest and precise (in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, for example) yet unable to convey the truth as we suspect it to be.

Still, I don’t know another term that includes all the above and I can’t imagine writing any other kind. For me, it’s not a trick or device. These are properly human narrators and the only ones I trust.

That’s not the only reason I find such narrators exhilarating to read and to write. The first person unreliable narrator has a theatrical quality and is, I think, the kind of writing closest to acting. The relationship between narrator and reader is active and at stake in every sentence. There can be an element of game-playing but, if the reader doesn’t want to play too, it won’t work. An unreliable narrator keeps the writer on her toes. No matter how carefully I plan things, the narrator will find holes and slip through. The slippery narrator?

Unreliable narration is delicious for mystery, ghost stories, novels where ambiguity shrouds the core. Of course, the writer is pointing us in this direction or that, asking us to work out what the narrator is unwilling or unable to tell us. But how can we have absolute resolution any more than we can ‘resolve’ the human being sitting next to us? We only catch glimpses of something that might be truth. We may have to guess and keep guessing beyond the novel’s end.

My favourite narrator is Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Exquisite in his pedantry, he beguiles and eludes us. I’ve read the book many times and meet Stevens afresh with each reading. Critics praise Ishiguro for quietness and stillness in his writing but I think the simplicity of his prose allows the opposite: a deafening roar of uncertainty and loneliness. I re-read it as if going repeatedly to watch a great actor perform, knowing that no two performances will ever be quite the same. Why, when the words on the page don’t change? Because I will be different each time. Because we are unreliable listeners and unreliable readers and that, too, is part of the story.

[Susanna Jones’s latest novel is The Missing Person’s Guide to Love, and is out this week in paperback.]

I’m a Texan, and I’m not going too far out on a limb when I suggest that it’s the rare non-Texan who knows anything about Marfa. It’s a desert town way out west, population 2,400 and that’s on a congested day. Considered hip by the artsy crowd from Dallas and Houston, Marfa’s one long-standing, quirky claim to fame is its lights. Not electrical light bulbs, not lightning, but mysterious flickers of light that show up late at night on the horizon about ten miles out of town. Some people say the lights bounce while others say the lights flash a variety of colors. The lights don’t show up every night so your chances of seeing them are hit or miss. But they’re real. Scientists from all over the world have studied them, but to date, no one can explain what the lights are or where they come from. But the lights are there, all right. The cowboy who first reported them in the 1880’s swore he wasn’t imagining things. Nor do the people who today come to Marfa just to see and photograph the lights. There’s something out there and it isn’t campfires or car headlights. Whatever it is, it’s spooky.    

So I’m speculating that the spooky factor is why author Thomas Hettche’s character, Niklas Kalf, eventually ends up in Marfa. Maybe the lights play a role in helping Kalf understand what happened to his kidnapped wife. I can only guess since I have to wait for the book to be released next month. Even then it’ll probably be close to August before I get it since shipping from the UK to Texas seems to take weeks. So here’s my S.O.S. Could those of you who have read advanced copies please drop a few clues about Hettche’s take on Marfa? And does anybody happen to know how Hettche discovered Marfa? Could it be that he was a Texan in his previous life?       

As for the Marfa Lights, I’ve never seen them. But there’s always the next time.

[Ann Weisgarber is the author of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, and her website is here. What We Are Made Of by Thomas Hettche is published on 4 July.]

The other school, to which I belong, is to take a book that has nothing at all to do with where you plan to be. The books that don’t belong are the ones you’ll remember; and remembering those books will shape your memories of the place. This isn’t a reasoned position on my part, but a simple observation. I’ve taken appropriate books with me, or bought them in situ, and what they’ve done is disappoint. I read Quiet Days in Clichy in a flat fifty yards from Place de Clichy and I hated it. (OK, I would probably have hated it anywhere.) Books set within fifty miles of where you’re staying either confirm what surrounds you, which makes them redundant, or don’t, which makes them not only redundant but also, well, party-poopers.

The books that stay with me, not simply as books but as ways of remembering the whole experience of the visit, are those that don’t fit, that don’t belong, that are utterly unsuitable.  Dozens of examples spring to mind;  in fact, it’s hard to think of a holiday that doesn’t have its literary counterpoint. Cologne, for me, is Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin biography, In the Court of the Red Tsar. A beach on Thassos is Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque. The train from Foggia to Naples one blazingly hot August? Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, a copy of which I found, astonishingly, in the newsagent’s of a Puglian fishing village. Phoenix, Arizona? Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec. A summer some years ago at my home beach of Sperlonga? Rohinton Mistry’s utterly unsummery and utterly unforgettable A Fine Balance. My sense of each of these books is inseparable from where they were read.

But the strongest association of all, and I don’t know why, comes from a train journey across mainland Greece, from Kalambaka, the small town neighbouring the extraordinary cranes’-nest monasteries of Meteora, to the port of Volos. The journey began at one of those country stations I love and took over four hours as the train puffed industriously across what felt like vast – to my eyes, totally un-Greek – plains of what may have been wheat. The heat was intense, the language of information local, the food and water warm and odd-tasting in the best, i.e. most foreign, way. I spent the entire trip, sitting on my wooden seat with my rucksack as a sort of pillow, immersed in the horrible goings-on of Incarnate by Ramsay Campbell.

I’ll be spending this summer in England. Any suggestions?

[Little Monsters by Charles Lambert is out now and you can buy it here. Charles Lambert’s own blog is here.]

The Picador Shot is a mini-book with one or two short stories in it to make the most of the moments when you want to read something but don't want to carry a weighty book around.  Picador Shots are priced at £1.99 and are all written by Picador authors including Sylvia Brownrigg, Daniel Mason, Edward Docx, Nell Leyshon, James Hopkin, Deborah Eisenberg, Jim Crace and Graham Swift.

Ray Robinson's online Shot, Cut is available to read below, or you can download it as a pdf here.]

C U T by Ray Robinson

Eyes closed, Robert lies in bed listening to Cynthia clattering around the house. The sneezings, coughings, slappings, rufflings, knockings and bangings have become a strangely reassuring prelude to his day. They yo-yo him in and out of consciousness, until he, too, is fully awake.

He imagines her fingers sliding through her thick, damp hair, temples being massaged by long, slender thumbs. Her head hurts – it must. Hurt like her brains are going to explode and she struggles to keep them in. They’re becoming a regular feature, the Sunday afternoon drinking sessions. It’s a worry, but he says nothing. And he had to manhandle her home last night, back here to this very bed upon which he undressed her.

And though he knew he shouldn't, he did.

The hish of slippers on floorboards: she makes her way back into the bedroom. Though he is by far the heavier of the two, his are the tiny toe-scurries of a ballerina compared to her baby elephant steps. Hers a farmyard childhood with acres of rooms to charge around in; his full of whispers in suburban box rooms, father in the study working, always working. Eggshells and tiptoes, he learned to walk like a princess.

Slurps: she tilts a mug of coffee to and from her lamb chop-pink lips.
The click-click of the lighter as she fires up a Benson.

Sometimes she looks up into his face with such gravity and says, Do you love me? Of course, he says. Then she says, But I love you more. Yes, but my love for you is wider, he says, stretching out his arms and fingertips. She does the same, and they are crucified lovers, his chin resting on the top of her head. That's so unfair, she faux-whines into his chest. Arms fold into an embrace, he envelops her and whispers, I could not love you more, silly.

Eight months may be a short time, but already their love is the colour of years.

He imagines her dressing gown wrapped around her skin, and he wonders, Does she remember?

The question rattles inside his skull.

That is the drawer being slid open: the knickers and bra drawer. That is the brisk swish of fabric against skin: she pulls her knickers on. Then with her back to him – lest he rolls over and sees – she pushes the dressing gown from her shoulders, lets it fall to the floor: a gentle fudumph noise. She sucks air through her teeth and removes yesterday's white sports bra, replacing it with a similar one. She pulls it over her head, arms through the thick straps.

And then she slips it into the left side.

They always make love in the dark. She floats high above him, hips lushing like waves against the shore, the band of her bra like a beacon moving closer, closer still, then a pale shadow soaring away from him. She makes soft sounds as he watches, and sometimes he gets lost in the theatre of it all and reaches up to touch her. But she pins him down, fire-eyes glowering in the bedroom dark.

The wardrobe door creaks, hangers rattle. She’s putting her uniform on. Its colour: the blue of Milk of Magnesium. That tight blue uniform she wears in the salon where she works on the High Street.

He didn't plan to do it; he wasn't thinking. But she opened her eyes for a brief moment, blinking up into his face, and she must have seen the expression written there, for the apostrophe of a solitary tear, lit in the lamplight, slithered down her cheek. She rolled away from him, pulling the sheet over the exposed skin. He wanted to hold her then, to tell her over and over again that he was sorry, that what he had just done was unforgivable, but surely it didn't matter because they loved each other more than…

But he couldn't.

He dashed out into the garden and clung to the fence, breathing deep. The sound of the beck at the bottom of the garden coming to him – an airy dialogue passed between them.

She is dragging the brush through her hair. Swishing, tearing sounds, removing knots – she calls them cotters. She takes great pride in her hair now; she never thought it would be this long again. Now it’s as long as his, the same colour too – a Demerara beige, she calls it. They are often mistaken for brother and sister, apart from his eyes are a periwinkle, almost Listerine green, and hers a burnt umber, Malteser brown.

The bed moves as she sits down.

He wishes she would snuggle herself around his warm body, bury her face into his hair. With this thought, he lets a thin smile buckle his lips, then he fights to unbend it because she might remember, and what would she think to a smile like this?

Of course he makes mistakes.

Drunk, he often lays in bed next to her, stroking her face, arms, her legs, begging her to let him at her 'good' breast. Sorry, she always says. I just can't. She'll chart a line of pitter-patter kisses down onto his hunger, turning it in on him. Fold it, overlap it, till he is released and soft with love.

Once he tried to get in the shower with her. She curled herself up in the corner and screamed blood to her face: GET OUT YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING BASTARD. Days passed before she would let him hold her again, breathlessly pounding his chest.

Bastard. Bastard. Bastard.

She exhales through her teeth, then the cigarette to her lips: a few pt-pt sounds as she takes it down to the butt. I thought you would have given up, he remembers saying. She laughed out smoke and said, What's the point?

He pictures her taking a drowsy look at the pile of clothes concertina'd across the floor, shed taxingly only a few hours ago, perhaps trying to recall how she got home.

Pt... pt-pt... pt...

But last night he looked.

He was alarmed by the size of it. The crude butchery stretching from the top of her armpit to her sternum. Inches of it. Inches with a brown splodge of nipple at the centre, twisted, flat, misshapen. He was surprised that she even had a nipple, expecting just the whole thing to be gone. It was so unlike how he imagined. It was meant to be small and neat, not that Frankenstein disfigurement, not that crude slasher's seam, as if the surgeon had used a rusty spoon to cut through the skin and scoop out her lymph and breast tissue. Yes, it would be neat and thin, and he would trace its delicate line with his tongue. And with the fever of youth, that animal bed-soaking lust in their veins, they would submerge, diving into one another. In the morning he would shove her silicon falsie down his pants and parade around the bedroom like a Chippendale. Christ, how she would laugh, gasping for breath. Once shame-withered and cautious, now blossoming into careless pride.

I'm in remission.

Her expression refused to echo the pure hopefulness of the statement. She has to go to the hospital every three months. If only the specialist's certitude meant something to her.

But I know I haven't got long. It's just around the corner. You are my last chance at Love.

He wears the hat of the listener then, the hat of the patient carer. But the hat is fake and simply does not fit nor suit him. He rummages through his imaginary hatbox for one more honest, but after a while his feet lead him from that room to another, to be alone with his unutterable, disloyal fears.

Sometimes when holds her he wishes his good cells could enter hers, cleanse her in some way.

Sometimes when he is inside her he feels that he is fucking the grave.

Shuffling noises along to the head of the bed – is she leaning over, looking? She pulls the thin sheet back a little, over his shoulder. Then a little more, until it's past his thigh. She brushes a few strands of hair from his cheek. He pictures his body: soft and rounded against hers: lithe, pale, almost muscular.

He feigns the symptoms of being woken. He catches his breath, fearing the words, wishing he could rewind the film of the previous night, alter it somehow, chop it up, splice it out, cut the entire scene.

Hello.

He will have to open his eyes for he can't escape it.

She quizzes him softly,

And how come you're so awake this morning?

He flashes his eyes up at her, blinkingly, through sleep-jumbled hair. He is shocked; in the darkness of the room he can just make it out: she is wearing make-up; mascara, a touch of dark eye shadow, and lipstick – Pepto-Bismol pink.

He pulls her warm body down onto him and kisses her neck, the heady, familiar scent of the woman he adores, gently strumming the strings of his libido.

She speaks into his neck, Jesus. Was I totally off it last night?

Waves. Waves of anxiety flush over him.

Yeah, something like that.

He holds her at arm’s length, and his gaze wanders from the strangeness of her made-up face to the left bulge in her dress. She sees him looking. He rolls over, pulling the bed sheet back up to his chin.

What he takes as love is already beginning to disappear inside of itself, folding up, cut like paper, an origami duck, something awkward with sharp edges that move if you touch them. The duck opens its wings and flaps about inside him. He asks it to leave, he tells himself that he is just being silly, but his body is a cage of fear and disgust.

He steals a quick glance at the smiling clock: twenty-past-eight. Six hours and he’ll be back in that too-big, quiet office at the factory, waiting for him and his worries to fill the sweet-scented air, the silence punctuated by the secretary's machine gun rat-a-tat-tatting on the plastic QWERTY.

He feels it: she’s watching the back of his head, thinking secret thoughts. The bed sinks behind him again as she moves. The softness of her lips and warmth of her breath dance upon his cheek. A sweet Love You floats into his ear be