Scene:

a painted port, red sky, shrill, hysterical,

a twisted universe on a sloping street and at the end –

in the distance – skewed perspective and crudely painted ships,

their imaging a child’s. I remember it as odd, dislocated,

and more, it appeared suddenly, out of nowhere, shocking

and surreal. Everything else believable as movies go, conventional:

blonde-haired heroine, Marnie, shorty-coats and horse riding

and blue suits and rooms of books and cocktails at the country club,

but oddly, in the midst of it, James Bond pulls up in a sports car

on that strange, painted street. What was that about? (Was he James

Bond then?). Red I think, the car, or steel blue, again, a sudden insertion –

inexplicable – onto a noxious dream set. Was Bond the shrink?

Someone was, and he worked ponderously, to unravel the cause

of it all. (Maybe Leo G. Carroll?). But anyway, he, James Bond,

drove a smart convertible and pulled up in a street of cobbles

and ropes and pulleys and cries of seagulls, the salty noise of the docks,

a cliché of form – the point I suppose – the contrast, a world

of the hysterical past, the locked past, but entrance to the present,

and to the future, for Marnie, now dishevelled, still blonde, stricken.

But bounding up the stairs and thumping on a locked door,

Bond found her mother, another damaged creature, remembering,

then telling of sex; Marnie on a sailor’s knee, perhaps many sailors,

and very strange weather, like a horse on its head.