1001 Nights Cast

One. Fairytale

Once there was a monster who married a beautiful woman, while the moon rose over the hilltops. What he didn’t realise—and why she had chosen him as her husband—was that she herself was also a monster. She hid behind her collection of rare Balkan lacework, her angora goats, her urbanity. But she had chosen to live on the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere so that on those nights when she became another creature she could do so knowing no one would see.

Except him. The neighbour, the monster without a memory, who charmed her with puns, promised her so little, and remembered nothing the morning after. They married and agreed to fly to the Balkans together via London and Paris. They both pretended to be terrified that he would stuff up in a major way, but secretly her terror was that it was she who would stuff up and reveal to him, to the world, her dark secret.

Two. Drama

I lost him. Somewhere near Buckingham Palace I lost him. Somewhere near the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben I lost him.

I retraced our steps, I went back to the godawful overpriced hotel where he’d sat staring at the price list for half an hour before saying, ‘I don’t get it, who’s the main character?’

He’d been quiet as we walked. Was he sulking? I can never tell. He has a brain injury, which he calls his ‘brain bane’. He said he wanted to kill my goats when we got back home to our Garden of Eden, but that was nothing new. You’re all talk, I’d tell him, and he’d say, ‘And you’re a goddess, born in a shell, wearing a red hood on her way to her grandaddy’s house and I don’t trust that old bastard one bit. And if I’m all talk, why am I so quiet?’ He snakes his way out of everything. Fix my fucking fences, I’d shout at him, go write your unfinishable novel, you addled old goy, I’d shout. Your deep bloody stories. ‘Stories don’t have depth,’ he’d mutter back. ‘Stories have spread.’ I wished I was shouting at him now. But I lost him somewhere in London.

Police. Embassy. Cancelling my meetings, except the one with the dealer bloke, and then crying on the dealer bloke’s shoulder for an hour and I don’t know what he made of my rambling talk of Night Novels and Judaism and uncompleted sex and silkworms and fairytales. The dealer bloke, like the woman from the embassy, probably wondered why I was with him in the first place. Or maybe I’ve lived with him so long I don’t work well in the real world. Maybe he lost me.

‘Keep it light’, he’d say. I’m keeping it light, my love.

He has survival skills. That glib tongue. His ability to eat junk food. Money—loads of cash because he doesn’t trust banks. But wouldn’t loads of cash make him a target? At least he isn’t the suicidal one. Except he calls it ‘suicidal-esque, which is less bloody than Tarantino-esque and less Czech than Kafkaesque’.

I was beside myself. I even rang Mum and Dad. Who hate him. Who blame him for wrecking my life. Personally I blame them for pushing me into his arms, and I never stopped to thank them (to thank Mum and Dad, not his arms).

Oh, Christ, his arms. Big and huggy and strong from the farmwork apart from never getting round to fixing the fences despite it being included as one of the wedding vows. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was too scared to go back with me. Maybe he doesn’t know how to work the wire strainers. He’s all talk, after all.

Three. Thriller

Cars were burning. It was 3 in the morning. Hell was turning, scorning, mourning, spurning. On TV, somewhere in Europe. Secular or religious or muslim or christian. Probably poor.

I’d been crying, and remembering the shit he said: ‘Keep crying, woman, stay properly hydrated, don’t drink the water in London, it goes through seven nannas before it reaches the sea.’

I wasn’t sleeping, which is dangerous for me. That’s when I saw him.

Three masked men were hurling bottles into a car—it caught fire. Molotov cocktails, I thought. Another man ran up to them, grabbed at one of the masked men and tore off his mask. The camera slowed, a circle came round the unmasked one—a foreign voice pleaded for information on this man. But that wasn’t him.

He was the unmasker. The bystander, or whatever, who pulled off the mask.

I wrote down the time. I rang the hotel desk to check on the channel. I rang the police. I knew I’d sound mad. I’ve got history. I started packing. I’d go down to the police station and then get the early morning flight or ferry or—I didn’t know. I just knew I had to get there.

I once shouted at him, why do I love you when you’re so much work?! He whispered: ‘That’s why you love me. I hope so, because it’s all I can offer you. But you know, you’ll never get dementia, I’m like a full-time cryptic crossword puzzle.’

Little did he know I would soon be lost in—I think it was Paris—along with him.

Four. Filigree

It was while I was packing that I realised my rarest laces were missing from my suitcase. The special treasures. The ones I was going to show the curator at the V & A. The ones I’d found a pattern in.

The plot was becoming vertiginous. Burning Renaults, missing laces, missing husbands and sleep deprivation. I looked up. They were repeating the news. There he was again. I didn’t doubt it. It was something he would do, expose a rioter. And there was the scar on his arm.

Christ, his arms. I went out the door.