On the fringes of a literary festival in Wales, a French chanteuse is reading erotic poetry into a microphone. Her voice is sultry; 'His spunk (and there was a lot of it), in my hair, all over my cheek and on my punk records'. She looks up at her selected audience, 'Don't tell me you've come for nothing', she says.
On her head is a black bandana emblazoned with a silver skull-and-crossbones. In her left hand is a plastic tumbler of red wine. A string of black sequins hangs, unraveled from her black dress.
We wait patiently as she checks her phone for messages and refills the tumbler. She staggers back to the microphone and sings a song from the seventies that, she tells us, went into the charts just below the top forty. Her final erotic poem ends with the line, 'I licked his balls for comfort and then we fell asleep'.
Afterwards, I approach to tell her how much I enjoyed the show. She has put on a fur coat and diamante sunglasses. She asks where I am from. I tell her about my resolution. She leans towards me. 'In reality I have two first names and two last names but they have been lost in time', she says adding that they have been blocked from her memory. 'I don't like to think about them', she says. And, pulling her coat around her, she goes in search of her piano player.
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