Free Clowns At Midnight by Terry Dowling

with the guilt.
    ‘I still care for you.’
    ‘Julia, I know.’ Julia not Jules. ‘I really do know. But it’s hard right now. It’ll get easier and I’ll be glad when it does, but right now I want to be away from that world. I truly do wish you every happiness. Both of you. But I need to be away.’
    ‘You’ll call if you need anything?’
    ‘I’ll call if I need anything you can still give,’ I said, and before she could be stung added: ‘Which is more than you realise. But it’s tricky right now. It’ll get better.’
    There was a brief silence.
    ‘You seeing people?’
    ‘Starting to.’ The faces of Carlo and Raina came to mind; then I surprised myself by thinking of Gemma Ewins. ‘It’s good here, Jules. Really good.’
    ‘Well, I just needed to call, okay? Just wanted to check in. Your mum and Sam were worried.’
    ‘When you talk to them, say I need more time. They’ll understand. And you take care.’ Giving the cue.
    ‘You too. Bye.’
    And there it was. Intimacy phase-down accomplished; everything moved one more step along. Soon it would be good again. Smaller, distant, but better.
    After hanging up, I folded the map and went back to The Riddling Tree . But, splendid irony, I had to keep cutting text. My protagonist, Rollo Jaine, was becoming too reflective, too confessional all of a sudden. I accepted that for what it was, let myself write whole pieces that would never make the final version of the book, would probably not even survive the afternoon.
    In the end, it took two hours to smooth six single-spaced pages down to three. I felt better but edgy, calmer but restless. If only we could edit our lives as easily, trim the unwanted bits, delete the hardest of them. I couldn’t remember the last time fiction had been therapy like this.
    Those three pages triggered three more, so that when I shut down the laptop at last, I found that it was nearly eight o’clock. Weary, but curiously satisfied, I went out onto the terrace and stood looking through the bonsai garden up at the hill. The sun had set over its southern shoulder, leaving a wash of rose gold across the sky. The cicadas had stopped. There was only the chattering of willy-wagtails, the plaintive cries of roosting koels, the cawing of crows in the last of the light. Now and then the distant lowing of cattle came in from the fields. I relished it all.
    This was why I was here: to be back in the world after Julia, after that strange, sudden loss, inconceivable then, so inadequately mourned, Julia three months gone.
    I made dinner—re-heated chilli con carne with salad—and ate it at the plastic yard table near the northern end of the house. The mosquitoes weren’t a problem, so I stayed till around nine, sitting in the twilight watching hundreds of fruit bats against the deep blue, seeing the Milky Way as I hadn’t seen it in years, huge and impossible.
    Now I could risk the TT disks, check out the neighbourhoods. It would be hard facing all five, but it would be done. I could sign them, number them and lock them away. They’d be wholly mine again.
    Daylight was better for something like this, I realised, but, once again, it was the choosing that mattered. Even if I managed only one, I’d have made a start. I’d be winning.
    First I verified that Disk 4 was as I’d found it on the Friday night: four terrible minutes of finger-fumbling, racing heartbeat, quick glances away and back. Non-coulrophobes simply cannot know. The rogue black page was still in its place at Image 025; nothing else had been added.
    I selected one of the other disks then, loaded it and brought up its thirty-image neighbourhood. It turned out to be most difficult TT disk of the series, with the Blue Meaney at Image 023 and Tim James from the 1994 movie Funny Man at Image 030. My hands were shaking when I finally lifted the disk from the CD drive, scrawled Disk 1 on it and returned it to its case.
    Two out of five. A good start. I could leave off.
    But better