PROJECT

A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She's a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.

- RACHEL CUSK

We had met in a bookstore. She was interested in books. In addition to being a film star, she was the model for a popular brand of face cream, and her image looked out everywhere, from shop windows and hoardings and the rain-streaked Perspex of bus shelters. In the photograph, she appeared very young and happy. Her smile had a sweetness that almost seemed to reproach those who looked at it for their dim and suspicious view of life.

She lived in a large house on the other side of the river. In person, she was very small, and the house was like a big doll's house, with her as the doll inside it.

We knew a couple of people in common. One of them told me a funny story about a dinner they'd attended at a restaurant, where M's bodyguard had insisted that she change places with another film star, who was older and less famous, because he was worried that M's position at the table exposed her to danger.

It was hard not to feel ugly next to M. Part of it was the ugliness of experience. I had never learned how to make experience easier for myself. For M it was the reverse. Her difficulty lay in her distance from the random violence of insignificance. Personally, I felt saturated with that violence. All my life it had been made clear to me how unimportant I was. M and I both secretly felt that it was the ways in which we had been damaged that had given us our power.

It was autumn, and the city became inexorably colder and wetter and grayer. In the face-cream advertisement, M remained wreathed in the pink flowers of spring.

On sunny mornings, people ran beside the river, men and women running past like gods in the sun, tall with dazzled eyes and windswept hair. Other men and women lived in tents beneath the stone bridges and brushed their teeth in the water fountains. Sometimes their shoes could be seen, placed neatly side by side outside the tent's zipped entrance.