The man looked shocked. There was a pause. 'It is awful,' he said at last, as though suddenly discovering modesty.

'You are the one who holds the knife.'

'That is not what I meant. To think there is no solidarity, even amongst yourselves.'

Still the actor smiled.

'Well, what are you waiting for?' asked a member of the audience. 'Why don't you kill him? That is why you came here. A didactic execution.'

'It will teach you nothing,' said the man.

'I think it's because you are a coward that you do not kill him.'

'Oh, I will kill him. But it will do nothing if you care only for yourselves.'

'Perhaps you need a massacre,' suggested a new voice from the dark in a disinterested tone, with a faint English accent on his words.

'I had hoped. But if there is no choice.' He shrugged. 'It makes no difference to me. In my eyes, you are all just so much nothingness.'

'Ah. A peasant philosopher. Then why are you preaching to nothingness?'

'I will not argue with you,' the man stated. 'Not even to point out that there are no "peasants", only people. Your arguments are spun from nothingness as well.'

'I think it's because you cannot argue.'

'Think what you wish. But then that is your problem. Thinking, always thinking.'

'Then you think we should not -'

'Enough!' The man waved the knife, slicing the air. 'Enough of talk. I came here to demonstrate your worthlessness to you. Now do not think, or talk, or listen. Watch.'

The man drew up the knife in an ancient sacrificial motion, grasping the actor - the sacrifice - by the collar and hauling him into the air. There was a sudden stiffening and tension in the room, as the audience realised all together that this was, of course, reality.

'Hold, friend,' murmured one in the silence.

'Too late for that. I am intent on killing.' He flashed a smile at nothing. 'And then I may kill all of you. That is my power, the common power, friend. The one you have forgotten.'

'Demonstration is one thing. Do not be too hasty,' spoke the other voice. 'If you have something to -'

'We must be hasty, always. That is another thing you have forgotten.'

The actor, suspended in mid-air, face reddening from the constriction of his collar round his neck, let out a tiny sound, at once frail and querulous. He seemed to be making a gurgling plea to his captor, but in a voice too weak to hear. The latter simply widened his smile and chuckled knowingly, like a father pouring iodine on to his son's cut finger.

And then the knife fell, in a flashing, jerky motion. First there was a terrified face, then there was a knife and a face, and then there was just a knife.

The head fell backwards, the body slumped to the floor, and the wound across the throat smiled widely at the crowd. Blood spread out in angel-wings around the limp corpse; it moved with the rapid cellular crawl that is vital, passionate, striving, when confined to the pathways of our veins, but over a wider area it had the aspect of a tide of rats fleeing a stricken ship. A salt metallic taste rose into the air, an ancestral tang of spilt blood swimming among the coffee cups, and suddenly everybody knew. It was like water running into a grave, or the cold quick shudder as the widow wakes up and then remembers.

There are moments when time does not move, when the story breaks. They sat and stared and the impetus was lost. It was as though a little herald in one of their treasured ancient plays had been shot unexpectedly by a sniper, and so the play could not continue.

'You killed him.' The student voice sounded different: a child's now, robbed of any sham dignity in the moment of horror.

'Indeed.' The man smiled a stupid mocking smile. 'Now, for all your talk, what will you do about it? Nothing, because that is the way you are. This is the fruit of your art and your intellectualism - look!' He gestured theatrically towards the corpse, lying on its slick red surface.

'He was. This is.'

Where could you begin?

They sat and were hopeless. If he kills us now, what could we do, really? One pictured the police arriving the next morning and surveying the corpses and coffee-cups, and tried to think of a single thing he might be leaving behind that was worth bringing to mind in the instant of death. People in the audience had begun whimpering. It started with a single person, then spread like a religion or a disease until all were whimpering in a kind of round. Despite his professionalism, the man onstage could not help laughing.

And then when the 'house-lights' were finally turned up slowly, unwillingly, by one of the whimperers, they all saw that the actor too had a smile across his lips, and that it trembled with the irritating superiority and cleverness they had so often shown him, and that he was not dead at all.

The performance of the mysterious man and the failed actor was praised very highly: the trick coat the actor wore to let his head loll back and reveal the gaping, painted wound at the moment of murder; the pigs' blood they had somehow procured to give the true reek of death; the make-up which hid the murderer's face. It was a face they had all been used to seeing in the corridors of the University, a face fat with smugness and facts, that of a wonderful actor who until now had disdained to come to The Yellow Leaf. How he had made himself resemble a plain man with a 'cause', they would never know.

He took the stage once more, as the others were still standing around talking low and quickly, excited despite themselves. There was a clear purpose here, a lesson after all.

'That, friends,' he declaimed grandly, 'is the power of art. People say it is an ugly world and that we would do best to settle in amongst the ugliness, that here we are lying to ourselves. But I say that I lied to you tonight to show you a truth: your own strength, to show you that we can take everything - from our minds and from the ugly world - and examine it and learn about it. Through art. That is always the way to proceed, and as ever we are the avant-garde. We are not so powerless as we usually feel, or as they would have us feel. Goodnight, friends.'

He bowed, proudly humble, vanishing like a trick into the lantern-light and applause.

The students' noise had hardly intruded into Maria Rada's mind. As she had worked in the kitchen, she had been thinking - what had she been thinking? Another lapse in memory, but it did not trouble her as she had always thought old age would. It did not seem like advancing decrepitude to her, rather the shedding of the unnecessary until what was left was natural and efficient - a perfect cog, a little world-spring. That suited her and her reminiscent mind, which always traced back over the same grooves so that it did not matter when she could not recall what she had been thinking of. What she lost in breadth she gained in depth. A whole life stood behind her commonplace memories: an unremarkable life, really, but one in which she had acquitted herself well. She had been made too wise to expect more, but if she had been a greater success she couldn't see herself being a different person to the one she was now. Placid and calm she had always been, she was sure.

Her husband would be home soon from work, with maybe some firewood and oil and anything else he had got at market. (Maria Rada's formidable haggling was confined to The Yellow Leaf now by creeping rheumatism, but her husband did nearly as good a job; if he did not, he would have his wife to answer to.) A long day at work and the hard journey to market, maybe to buy nothing: perhaps no way for an old man to live, but he managed fine. And on his return there would be warm food and a good bed and the easy conversation of two people who know each other so well they talk more from habit than need. Comfort.

The pot was boiling and into it she dropped some cabbage leaves. They swirled, left a whirl in the water like a fortune-teller's tea-dregs that soon vanished. The students had had their night; they strolled home now past the window at her back. She wondered what would happen to them - not really a mother's concern, more that of a primary school teacher inquiring about a former pupil, who asks the little questions demanding the map of a whole future.

Could they ever get out of this? What would old age bring them, with their directionless wandering and aimless fantasies? She wondered if she had ever been as the students were now, lost like a man at sea who will cling hopelessly even to seaweed to stay sane, and decided she had not.

There was a little jeering in the street: a clever boy had altered a popular French poem to make it an insult, and was half-reciting, half-singing it in a smarmy falsetto. Maria Rada was surprised she still had her French, which she had learned to say nothing of consequence to a man once. (Ah! So, she thought, there were still things inside her that could prick with the memory of that agonised indulgent joy.) She was yet more surprised when she heard to whom the poem was addressed: each stanza ended, like a comic song, with the same word: '... Maria.' Surely they would not -

But no, she saw who their Maria was. It was a little girl with long black hair, who had stopped just by Maria Rada's window to see who was speaking about her. She was sure she had seen her at the club this evening - there is a certain hunted look, a need not to be noticed, that always makes an impression. It was alarming to see insecurity like that, sudden childish hatred and pain out in the darkened street. The girl turned around and walked on, and the voice swelled behind her; she turned, and it vanished like a shadow. She walked on and it recommenced, but she did not turn again. It was strange, the way the long coat over the thin agitated shoulders was as expressive of pain to Maria Rada as a mouth and cheeks and eyes. The girl's figure shrunk a little as she walked on down the street, into the light of a lone lamp, a ray strung across the street like a spider's thread. The other students came into view now: vast figures rising up as they passed the window, faces turned to the girl.

Maria Rada felt guilt stab suddenly as her hands continued to slice a carrot evenly. What was the good of this? Those vast shadow-egos out there that pursued the girl, as children chase a differently shaded skin or an unusually cast mind. Why had she wanted to encourage little meetings in which such bitter childishness could thrive?

The shadows moved on, throwing a few more hard words into the road, and the girl was left alone. She shuffled away; in the spot under the street-lamp Maria Rada saw she had something in her hand - a piece of paper, held as you would hold the wrapping of a stolen present. And there she dropped the paper, and did not trouble to pick it up.

It seemed a sad complicated kind of youth to Maria Rada. Had it been like that for her?

And then a boy appeared beside the girl, carrying a sweeping brush in his hand. He picked up the paper and tried to hand it to her, tentatively. Maria Rada recognised the boy who cleaned up the hall for her. A good boy. Slacking off, she thought, smiling. And he had seemed so honest... but then some things could not wait for the young. But the girl did not want the paper, whatever it was. He insisted, pleaded, leaning forward and speaking rapidly in the lamplight. The girl yelled at him once - 'No, it's no use! Leave me alone!' - and turned around. Yes, Maria Rada remembered that posture - the girl turned away, arms wrapped round herself, haughty, indifferent... and eyes looking back a little to see if it had affected him.

there in the lamplight so well as the shining drunk anticipatory days before the Berlin Wall was torn down: a seeming act of war that pleased all the world.

Love, life... It was really all there was but death and work, the other side of the coin. They thought they were writers, artists, musicians, gods. She laughed her old crow's laugh, frightening her husband a little as he stepped in wearily from the night. She knew that they were the marvellous characters, the intense and subtle colours, the beautifully arcing bars of sound - the streak of bright light Shakespeare saw, that which scholars pore over books trying to catch in their dusty lenses, like hungry beggars lining curfewed streets. They had it, it was within them; they were art, and they grew as a perfect statue emerges from the granite cube, and would dissolve in time too. And who was the artisan? Not she alone, Maria Rada knew, but she was a part of it - the whole rest of the world that shifted beneath youth, slowly, irresistibly, like the fathomless sea. You forget it when you see the waves sparkling in the sun.

The End

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The Blooding of Amelia-Rose is a romance thriller. When Amelia-Rose finds herself without a husband, she retreats to an idyllic country cottage where she discovers strange country customs, dangers but also romance lurking in the valleys and moorlands of Exmoor...
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