MADELEINE FOSTER

Moving Pictures

No wonder, I thought, the face stretched vast above me, our ancestors believed in divinity. In deities and idols and higher powers. The scrunch of his dark brow; the amber skin across his cheekbones, his lissom arms; the tilt of his eyes, his lashes; something primal and wounded, even malign in his stare. It was mania-inducing, even there, in a dark room in Manchester’s Tatler Classic. Even then, in cinema’s golden age – an age already so brimming with beauty. 

My brother Sam and I had gone to the showing together. It’s what we did – we watched films. Usually a couple a week, at the Gaumont, the New Oxford, the Odeon. We’d done it ever since we were kids.

The film that afternoon had been my suggestion. I’d read The Talented Mr Ripley a year earlier, when I was fourteen, and fallen head-over-heels for it. When I heard about a film adaptation, I was thrilled. And when I discovered it was a French production – France, in 1962, embodying something brooding, cultivated, impossibly cool – I begged Sam to come along with me.

And he did: beneath the Tatler’s blinking Art Deco marquee, and through its foyer, the nicotine-stained walls crowded with posters of sun-baked European film stars. The stench of damp raincoats, cheap perfume – a spectral presage of the Tatler’s later, more sordid fate. And on through to the cramped auditorium, rain dropping dully from the ceiling, the romanceless air turbid with cigarette smoke, the whole room juddering under the weight of overhead trains, laden with people laden with longing. 

Plein Soleil was wondrous. Sumptuous, hypnotic, sun-drenched. Eerily dazzling. And, above all else, it gave us our first glimpse of something monumental. Our first glimpse – as it was for countless others – of Alain Delon.

Ever since the first silent photoplays, people have rhapsodised over the unearthly beauty of film stars. The spellbinding pull of gorgeous faces in celluloid. And it predates film, I suppose. Models. Thespians. Players and troubadours. Ancient orators and singers. People have fawned over that shining, lime-lit loveliness since our earliest days.

And yet it still feels absurd to say that film stars and starlets can change your world forever. Hyperbolic. Overblown. But it’s true. The right face, at the right moment, projected through some fathomless tapestry of flung light, can end one stretch of your life and give rise to another. It’s a wildering thing. 

And of course, my first glimpse of Alain Delon was earth-shattering. I can picture it even now. His face as it first flashed across the screen: sun-dappled, technicolour. His blue shirt, his tanned, graceful hands. And that long, languorous sequence – iconic now – of him drifting through an open-air market in mid-century Naples. His jacket slung sensuous over his shoulder, his mousy hair rumpled, cigarette dangled – helpless – between his knuckles, his lips. His blue, catastrophic gaze. How even the extras couldn’t help but stare.

I remember watching him recline, honey-limbed, on deck chairs, across bedspreads, in unbuttoned shirts. Dressing before mirrors, steering yachts with his bare feet, half-clothed, long-necklaced, drenched and back-lit against blue Mediterranean endlessnesses. The sheer intensity of his presence. 

I remember my face growing hot, that cramped sense of self-consciousness, the unforeseen anguish of every moment he slipped out of frame.

And I remember looking over to Sam, silver light pattering across his profile – his pitted cheeks, his soft, slim eyes – and seeing he, too, was rapt. Completely spellbound. And I remember sensing, wordless, a shared agony.

I think I knew straight away. My brother’s gaze in that moment – transfixed, desolate – told me everything. Or, I suppose, it confirmed what I already knew. It conjured memories of Sam’s childhood friends, of older boys at school. Of other, less cruelly beautiful stars: Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, James Dean. 

When we left the Tatler that day, bundling out into a lilac June evening, neither of us mentioned Alain Delon. His absence smouldered as we lauded the film’s score, its tension and transporting richness. Neither of us touched on his cold, louche charisma; his calculated grace. Nor did we broach his boyish magnetism; the grace notes of homoeroticism; the carved, ardent lines of his face. 

But we did watch it together again, two or three more times. And Sam went to even more viewings alone, since I often took babysitting work in the evenings. And, a fortnight later, we both got word of another Delon screening – an Italian film this time, called Rocco and His Brothers.

It was a tough watch. By turns luscious and savagely dark. I left the cinema heartsore, brutalised. But my enduring impression, once again, was of Delon’s impossible handsomeness. The shrill shock of him. How the monochrome film deepened his spry, feline magnetism. And of Sam slumped in the red velvet seat beside me, cloaked in cigarette smoke, his face cast skyward, utterly beyond hope. 

And that’s where it began, really. The whole saga. Because within a few days, Sam’s bedroom was plastered with pictures of Alain Delon. Pages and cut-outs from magazines, mainly, though he swindled some film posters from the box office clerk at the Tatler, too. Almost overnight, it became a sort of crypt – a reliquary of Delon’s sainted, dispassionate loveliness. 

Around the same time, Sam began styling his hair just like him. A lightly pomaded graduation cut, his dirty blonde locks dyed a deeper brown. He started wearing linen shirts, oversized Oxfords, preppy jumpers. Cream loafers and chinos. He found a large, hounds-tooth wool coat, à la Rocco, and wore it to death, even on warm days. One week, he even donned a white plaster over his left eyebrow. He dropped mangled French phrases into conversation, and took up smoking – affected a rakish habit of hanging a cigarette from his lip as he walked or read or waited for the bus.

He cut a cartoonish figure against the filthy Manchester slumlands. I often pictured him shedding his boiler suit at the end of his shifts at the steelworks, how his mates must have snickered as he pulled on his Riviera threads. 

And our Mum soon took notice. Even as a kid, Sam had always been the type who took great beauty and feeling to heart – had always been incapable of aloofness or detachment. So she accepted this new infatuation with learned patience. She regarded Delon as just the latest transfiguration of Sam’s heartfelt becoming; another milestone in his early, moon-eyed exploration of the wider world.

The same couldn’t be said for others. So earnest was Sam’s fixation, it wasn’t long before people started making comments. To Mum and I, mainly. Friends, family friends, neighbours, tactless passersby. Family, too. My Uncle – Mum’s brother – was the most direct: crossing his arms over his beer-bloated midriff, shaking his head as he derided Sam’s ‘new look’.

‘Your brother needs to nip it in the bud,’ he said, ‘before people get the wrong idea.’ He warned us that people had made unrepeatable suggestions. His tone gruff and weighty, as if speaking on behalf of some large, omnipotent order. 

We never did tell Sam. But it was obvious, after a while, that Mum became uneasy too. Over tea one evening, while Sam worked late, she asked me about Alain Delon.

‘Who is he, Shannon? Where did he come from?’ Like something supernatural. A mystic essence flung from the cosmos.

I explained that he was an actor. That Sam and I had been to see some of his films. ‘He’s huge in France,’ I said.

‘Well, I can see why,’ she sighed. ‘I just worry. Your brother’s eighteen now. He’ll be wanting to find himself a nice girl. But I worry people might find him a little…’ she flapped her hands at her temples, ‘intense.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t think he’s bothered about any of that, really.’

She laughed, arch. ‘Trust me. He’s that age. And he won’t be doing himself any favours parading around town, blabbering in French.’

But it was that blabbering, I’m sure, that led him to Yann. Barely six months after we first saw Alain Delon on the silver screen, Sam, on his lunch break, was sitting alone in a cafe. Almost Christmas, 1962. The greasy windows draped with tinsel, the torn plastic table covers garish in red and green. Sam heard Yann’s French accent as he spoke to the waitress and was dazzled. Sam – never timid – took the seat beside him and asked where he was from.

‘Fontainebleau’, Yann replied.

‘Posh,’ Sam told me, later. ‘Where all the old French Kings lived. Napoleon, too.’

Yann’s family had recently moved over to England for work. His father was a university lecturer in linguistics, and the family had been provided with accommodation in Chorlton-on-Medlock. Yann’s English was excellent, and he worked, somewhat casually, as a translator.

Sam asked how he was settling in England – the shift from Fontainebleau to postwar Manchester was surely absurd. But Yann was charmed by the city. By its gothic Victorian turrets, and the eldritch beauty of the old, many-eyed mills. The stark, fledgling prefab monoliths. The rugged, enveloping moors. 

But their talk turned mostly to films, and to film stars. And, inevitably, to Alain Delon.

Sam quickly discovered that Yann was a fellow fan. Equally pious, truly devout. What’s more, Yann was able to share glimpses into Delon’s French stardom that Sam had never been able to access. Rumours. Scandals. Early, hammy films that had never made a splash beyond l’hexagone.

They chatted for so long that Sam was almost an hour late back to work. When he finally told me about Yann, he’d already spent a fortnight’s worth of lunch hours idling in the cafe, hoping – with spotty success – to cross paths with him again.

After a few weeks, they had started spending all their breaks together, and even some evenings. Hanging in bars and clubs, watching films, walking the black, rubbled streets of the southern edge of the city. Sam spoke about Yann, increasingly, at home – clipped anecdotes, recollections of mispronunciations, of sweet cultural misunderstandings.

Then, sometime in February, Sam asked if I would babysit Yann’s little brother.

‘Yann normally does it himself,’ he explained. ‘But we wanted to see a film tonight. He’ll pay you, obviously.’

Since leaving school, I’d built up a steady roster of childminding work. I’d confided in Sam – and nobody else – my plans to save my wages and move to London. I had my heart set on a bedsit in Earl’s Court, or Camden. Working as a secretary, or maybe as a typist or a shop assistant. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be in the belly of it all: the gigs and boutiques and clubs and angular Soho Vespa-straddling angels. The rough, magnificent, abiding skyline. At the rate I was working, I knew I’d have enough saved within a year or two.

More than the money, though, I wanted to meet Sam’s new French friend. So of course I agreed. And as we were approaching Yann’s house later that afternoon, Sam, staring at his shoes, asked me a favour.

‘Is it okay if you keep this a secret? Pretend you were babysitting for someone else?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ I said. ‘Why?’

He was quiet a moment. He cleared his throat, waited for a throng of shivering pensioners to pass us by. ‘We just don’t want Yann’s family to know that he’s going out tonight. That he’ll be with me. People have been a bit funny about it, apparently.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Yeah. I don’t know, stupid jokes and stuff. It bothers Yann more than me, I think. His family are a bit hard on him. And I don’t think they like us hanging around together.’

‘Oh right,’ I said, tentative, sensing we were wading onto fragile ground. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.’

We walked on in silence, my chest swollen, warm. I was touched, I realised, by our new, conspiratorial intimacy. The disclosure of something unspoken. My involvement in a lie I sensed was somehow precious.

Meeting Yann that day only heightened my sense of camaraderie, of fellowship. And it was a joy to discover that he was as charming as Sam had let on. He was twenty years old – which seemed wonderfully grown-up at the time – with a mad mop of curled black hair, a large, sharp nose and a spatter of freckles across his cheeks. 

He was coltish and excitable in his movements, and spoke English in a way that made everyday expressions sound ornate and mysterious. He was often breathless in his praise of films and books and food and music and even scenery. Everything. I could see right away why my brother was so taken by him – by the feeling that he may, at any moment, combust.

He showed me around his family’s house: an Edwardian terrace with bay windows, mosaic tile flooring and bowed, chaotic bookshelves. Every surface was cluttered with half-filled notebooks, coffee mugs, flowers, journal cuttings, cigarette butts. A tousled eccentricity that felt almost staged.

‘Take any food you like,’ he said, ‘and you’re welcome to any of my books. I have lots of English ones. Oh! My records too, just over here…’ 

He introduced me to his three-year-old brother, Lucas: a rosy-cheeked boy in dungarees doodling in the front room. And then he and Sam headed out. 

After a short burst of shrieking over his bedtime snack, Lucas fell asleep, and didn’t stir the entire night. I watched a little television, painted my nails, then headed up to Yann’s room in search of something to read.

One perk of babysitting was the opportunity it always offered to snoop. Lightly, of course. I never rummaged, never delved into drawers or notebooks. But I often peeked my head into people’s rooms, cataloguing their cleanliness, stitching together some sense of their inner worlds. I always found that bedrooms, especially, embody a person’s dreams and wants and delusions. A kind of four-walled chimera. A curation of their own private idyll.

Yann’s room felt much like him: creative, curious. Sentimental, too. Littered with keepsakes from his childhood, with photos from home. And, like Sam, his walls were festooned with posters and cut-outs of film stars. I recognised a handful: Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Anthony Perkins in Psycho. And there, of course, tacked beside Yann’s headboard, a collage of Alain Delon. Cut-outs of him smiling, dozing; of his cheek crumpled against his hand, shoulders round and bare in bed; of his face turned, the long, pleasant line of his nose in profile; the allure of his neck – its tendons, its curves. A whole cluster of images – strangely confessional – beside Yann’s pillow. And with them, the conjured, gossamer image, like a borrowed memory, of his sleeping head.

I crossed the carpet towards his bookshelf and pulled out a worn English language copy of Goodbye to Berlin. As I did, I knocked a couple of paperbacks off the shelf, and they tumbled onto the desk below. I picked them up, nestled them back on the shelf, and tidied the pens and paper that had been disturbed beneath.

The handwriting on one page caught my eye. Just a few lines of blue ink on a torn scrap of notepaper. The looping Ds, the low square Rs, remarkably similar to Sam’s. I didn’t touch the note, only hovered above it, reading it a few times from end to end:

Dear Yann,

Thanks for the coffee earlier – my turn next. How about Friday?

Until then, you can find me at the Tatler. Our usual seats. (I can’t stop thinking about last weekend…)

Toujours,

S


Over the following weeks, I discovered that the letter was just one of many. 

I often caught Sam writing in his room, or perched on the low, mossy wall along our ginnel, pen and paper crumpled between his knees. And I came across a stash of letters in his bedroom, all written by Yann. 

There was a strip of pictures, too – black and white, the two of them nestled behind the frayed curtain of a train station photo booth. Sam had slipped it behind one of the Alain Delon portraits on his wall, its corner peeking out from behind his hard, furrowed brow. Sam’s arm wrapped around Yann’s waist. Yann’s wide laughing mouth smothered against Sam’s neck. Sam staring into the camera, face gleaming, so brash and disbelieving in his new, cherished undoing.

And then, one evening in June 1963 – about a year after Plein Soleil – Mum and I heard a knock at the door. A polite knock, almost timid. I opened it to a small, frowning woman – mid-forties, blue skirt suit, her cropped black hair silvering at the temples. And standing behind her was Yann, his face pale, his dark eyes cast low.

‘Is your mother home?’ she asked, French accent lacerating.

I nodded and invited them both inside.

My Mum rose to greet them, offered them seats on our couch. She brought in some tea and took the armchair, while I leaned back on the windowsill, facing Yann directly. He caught my eye, offered a pallid smile. 

‘I’m Veronique,’ the woman said, clutching her handbag in her lap. She nodded towards Yann. ‘Yann’s mother.’

‘Maggie,’ my Mum said, warm. ‘It’s nice to meet you. And you too, Yann. We’ve heard so much about you.’

‘Is Sam here?’ Veronique asked, scrutinising our living room: the popcorn ceiling, the brown, squat furnishings, the stench of paraffin. 

Mum, uncertain, looked to me. ‘No,’ I mumbled. ‘He’s working late.’

Veronique shuffled against the couch cushion. ‘That’s probably for the best. There’s something I need to discuss with you, Maggie, and it could get quite embarrassing.’

‘Oh,’ my Mum said, straightening up. ‘Right, I see. Okay.’

Veronique unlatched her handbag and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. Tight-lipped, she handed it to my Mum. Yann’s eyes remained fixed downwards, trained on a torn patch of wallpaper in the corner of the room. He was frozen, witless – a man condemned. 

‘What’s this?’ Mum asked.

‘It’s a letter,’ Veronique said, her eyes flickering towards her son. ‘I found it in Yann’s drawer. I believe it’s from Sam.’

I watched Mum’s eyes sweep across the letter line by line, her lips hard. She pored over it a long while, reading it through two or three times. The weak, ashen light from the window fell across the back of the paper, and between her fingers I could make out some of the words, penned in looping blue ink.


Sweetheart

can be together, I

I’ll never forget – can never

your funny hair in the

Yours, S


I looked at Yann again. He was frowning, helpless. His nails bitten, his hands shaking. A distinct, deep V between his brows. A tableau of something battered, something desolate.

I ran my thumb across the windowsill’s peeling curls of glossy paint, just watching. Mum’s flushed face, Veronique’s clasped hands. Their stricken stillness. My pulse thudded as I opened my mouth to speak.

‘It’s not,’ I began, my voice faint. All three sets of eyes turned towards me, oddly hopeful.

‘Not what, Shannon?’ Mum asked.

‘It’s not from Sam. The letter. It’s from me.’

Yann’s eyes widened, taut. He sat back in his seat, as if in surrender. Veronique glowered, her gaze raking slow from my toes to my hair. Mum met my eye, her expression flat, glazed. She seemed to see, in an instant, right through me. Right through everything.

‘You wrote this?’ Veronique asked, pointing to the letter.

I nodded.

‘Is this true, Yann?’ She asked, and Yann, his eyes still fixed on the wallpaper, nodded slow.

‘Sam’s been passing the letters between us,’ I said.

Mum placed the letter on the arm of her chair. ‘For how long?’ She asked.

‘A few months,’ I said. ‘Half a year, maybe.’

Nobody spoke for a short while, then Veronique turned to regard her son. ‘Won’t you talk? Can’t you explain yourself?’ She turned back to me. ‘How old are you anyway?’

‘Almost sixteen,’ I said.

‘Mon dieu!’ Veronique gasped.

‘Aren’t you relieved?’ Yann cut in, his gaze still downcast, distant, his jaw unhooked. His voice was dreamy, gauzy, barely there.

‘Relieved?’ Veronique said. ‘Relieved that you’re–’ she paused, scrambling for the translation, ‘that you’re canoodling this fifteen-year-old girl?’

I stifled a laugh.

‘Isn’t that better than what you thought it was?’ Yann said, raising his head for the first time, meeting his mother’s grey gaze. ‘It’s a relief, non?’

The lofty silence that followed was punctured by Sam’s arrival home. He was staggered initially, finding Yann and his mother perched on our couch cushions, a stolen love letter in our Mum’s lap. But he twigged on quickly, confessed to carrying our notes, to arranging secret rendezvous. His nonchalance was impressive, instinctive. Rehearsed. We each agreed that the romance would end, Yann and Sam never once exchanging a glance. 

Veronique, seemingly satisfied, left shortly after. Yann, still pale, followed close behind. Sam and I lingered in the living room, watching silent as Mum read and reread the letter. After a few minutes, she rose from her seat, folded the paper and, wordless, placed it in Sam’s trembling, outstretched hand.

Yann’s family returned to France a fortnight later. His dad’s post at the university had come to an end. It was only ever supposed to last the year – that’s what Sam said, anyway. But it seemed like a rushed flight. The new post, based in Montpellier, was due to begin in September. But Yann was gone by July.

On Yann’s last evening, I heard Sam sneak out of the house after we’d all gone to bed. (It wasn’t the first time – it had become a familiar sound since the spring. And, on occasion, I had even been roused by the sound of tangled footsteps in the hallway, by groaning bedsprings, and half-muffled fits of laughter through our shared wall.) 

It had been a hot day – the night never quite found lightlessness. I slept shallowly and, in the early hours, was woken by the lonely echo of Sam’s footsteps on the street below. I peered out from the window and saw him sitting on the pavement in front of our house. His legs were splayed out before him, limp as a rag doll, his shoulders hunched, swathed in the streetlights’ orange glow. His eyes were closed, his hair dishevelled, his forehead cradled heavy in his hand. He stayed there, unmoving, long after I’d slipped back to bed.

Once Yann had gone, Sam spent most of his time at home. He called in sick to work. He stopped going for walks. He ate less. He spent evenings in front of the TV, listless. He slept his weekends away.

After a few days, letters began arriving. Sam bundled them up and hid them under folded jeans in his wardrobe. I read them occasionally, mostly out of concern. It never felt intrusive, since the wording was so polite. Restrained, almost.


How is Manchester?

Have you seen any good films lately?

I think my mother is still suspicious

Montpellier is too hot

How is Shannon?

Through Yann’s sentences, I tried to decipher what Sam might have written back.

Were you serious about Paris?

We could stay at my Father’s in Fontainebleau, then find a flat in the city.

you’ll take a ferry?

Could you save up?


Sam didn’t mention Yann. He went to work, he came home. He dwelled, daydreamed. I invited him to the cinema, but he always declined. He told me he needed to be better with money. And when I offered to pay for his ticket, he refused, embarrassed at the suggestion.

The only exception he made was in the autumn, when the Tatler screened Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. Long, vacant, beautiful – completely mystifying. Delon, in his Italian suit, more heart-stopping than ever. Though his beauty felt changed, somehow. Well-travelled. As though it had acquired a new, worldly kind of agony. 

L’Eclisse’s two hours were rich with distance – the greyscale texture of loneliness. And yet it was in the story’s brief, sumptuous moments of connection – giddy, nibbling, crushing – that I felt Sam’s anguish. Tugging from the threadbare seat beside me, his heartache tangible, dense as a collapsing star. 

By the close of 1963, Yann’s letters had gained a weary tone.


I hate Montpellier. I hate Manchester.

I hate Montpellier. I hate Manchester.

Are you ever going to come?

Will you send me that photo? I want to see your face


In the lead-up to Christmas, Sam spent all his free time alone in his room. He smoked constantly, silver fumes unfurling through the gap beneath his door. 

On Christmas Eve, he joined some work mates at the pub, and stumbled home after last orders with a bloody nose. Mum panicked, begged him to explain what had happened. But he only laughed, delirious, so drunk and candidly desolate he could barely open his eyes.

He slept late the next morning, ignoring our Mum’s knocks, her pleas for him to join us for lunch. She left his presents outside his door: some socks, a new razor, and a book of French grammar. I slipped past a while later, and lay my own, brown paper-wrapped bundle on top of the rest. And, a few hours after that, I found the hallway bare.

On Boxing Day, Sam woke early, made Mum breakfast in bed, pulled on his woolly Delon coat, and led me out to the Tatler. He bought two tickets for a rerun of The Apartment. It was one of those films we always quoted together. (‘Cookie-wise.’ ‘October-wise.’ ‘Gracious-living wise.’) I always liked how melancholic it was. How bizarrely beautiful the vast, monochrome office sets, the unreal graphite vision of a bloodless New York. Sam knew this. In retrospect, it was a fitting swansong.

As we wandered out onto Oxford Street that evening, he pulled my present to him out of his pocket. Silhouetted beneath the Gaumont’s neon red lettering – a blazing red, the red of an old, phantasmal, long-dead world – he begged me to take it back.

‘It’s too kind,’ he said, holding the paper bundle towards me. ‘I can’t take it.’

But I insisted. ‘It’s yours. I want you to have it.’

‘But what about London? You’ve been saving up for so long.’

‘It’s fine. I can save up some more. You need it now.’

It was strangely easy for us to talk so indirectly. Some kind of knotted-root sibling lexicon. It was obvious – though unuttered – why I’d given him the money. What I couldn’t quite bring myself to say, or even to suggest, was that all the lonely evenings in strangers’ living rooms, all the sick stains, the countless nappy changes, the missed dates, the freezing walks home – they all still felt worthwhile this way. I knew, after all, that he’d have done the same.

‘It’s not easy,’ I said, as we rounded the black corner of Oxford Street, ‘seeing you so miserable. Please, just take it.’

And by the start of January, he was gone.

First to Fontainebleau, then, after a few weeks, to Paris, where he and Yann filled a chambre de bonne with books and posters and boxes of old transnational love letters. Sam sent home postcards and photos: of a blurry Notre Dame, and of Shakespeare and Co; of foppish students gathered beside the Fontaine Saint-Michel; of art deco street signs, metro awnings, the green glint of the Seine against ancient stone. Over time, it became clear that he had no intention of ever coming back to Manchester.

I got a job as a typist and, later, as a teacher. Sam stopped asking about London once I told him I was engaged. But he never stopped sending me near-weekly missives, their bright-coloured stamps with foreign words and quaint, dignified faces redolent of some seductive other world.

We mostly talked about films, or Mum, or work. Occasionally, I received small, additional notes from Yann. Well wishes. Film suggestions. Book excerpts. Funny stories of Sam and his clumsy Mancunian French.

And one day – it must have been around ’66, ‘67 – I received a postcard. On its face, a watercolour rendering of the bouquinistes along the Seine. Each green box bursting, a cornucopia of scratty, spineless books and trinkets. The sky white, tourists clustered and aimless as pigeons in their shift-dresses and sunglasses and suits. Blue ink across the back, Sam’s tiny, looping longhand, only scruffier, as if composed in a rush. It read:


Shannon,

You’ll never guess who we’ve just seen on the Rue Saint Vincent. Alain fucking Delon! Just as gorgeous in the flesh as he was at the Tatler in ’62. 

Yann and I died, obviously. I, in my awful French, called after him, thanked him. He looked furious – really quite scary. I suppose beauty covers a multitude of sins.

It made me think of you, anyway. Of Manchester, and our childhood, and our cinema trips. All of it. So here, in my awful English: thank you. I think I probably owe you everything. There are no real words in any language to express how unbelievably dear you are.

All my love to you (and bump),

S

Madeleine is a writer and museum professional based in Manchester, UK. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Argyle, Fairlight Books, The Brussels Review, Scribbled., and Hemlock Journal. In 2024, she achieved third place in a short fiction competition held by Confingo Publishing.