You write of sitting in the cold of anxiety about your grant not coming & how you lonely you are & how you'll send the money
for those jeans of yours she paid for not wanting to come between her & her mother & of the growing
distance between you such a poor, proud country boy unwilling, still to give up on what all see as a crazy dream
& talking of emigration & how you couldn't find the book she wanted in the shops, for it was sold out
A letter to your English girlfriend never sent & poignant all the more for it
I.I Letter 2
You write of your concern for us, my mother & me, praying we have enough to eat saying you wish you were there
to stand in hopeless Russian food queues for us and how hard it is to be so helpless You talk of shouting on the phone & how you didn't mean to do it
& of how love and pain are two sides of the same coin & how when you & my mother talk you never say anything much, just talk about the Museum
& dinosaur bones & how mad this is, how wrong my mother would say those bones were your reason for your so-called love that she should have seen the naked ambition in your eyes
that of a man used to poverty, reaching for more aiming for notoriety, whilst lying of love
I.I.I Letter 3
You call my mother ' Princess' (my mother doesn't know this is cliche) & talk of British superstitions such as black cats being unlucky
& ask why Russians think asking for photographs of people is unlucky a superstition my mother doesn't recall
when I ask her about it now Black cats, is that why I ended up in hospital in Britain in a land of the free robbed of my freedom
because we had a black cat? I always thought them lucky, adhering to the Russian superstition I guess I might have been wrong
back then you talked of emigration of wanting to move to Russia to be with us
I.V Letter 4
I can mostly only imagine it from my mother's words your letter to her who was 23 named ' Lily' after the flower of death
bringing the death of our family She calls you ' Day-Day' like your youth's English girlfriend in your mid-life crisis
you've turned into a poet & are talking of your secret love & nursing memories of love-bites all else is dust & forgotten
you'd later cry on the Chinese hotel bed in front of your wife, my mother ' how can I refuse these offerings' & eleven years go by
occasionally we talk on the phone it's something you don't deserve
Based on the letters my English step-father wrote to a) his first, English girlfriend b) my Russian mother c) his Chinese mistress, now his new partner.