It occurred to him to make up his bed, throw the maroon duvet on and get under it, take a sleeping pill. It was 4.55pm and still light outside, his mind drifted onto a scene from ‘Place Vendôme’, the 1998 film starring Catherine Deneuve, as a rich, troubled, alcoholic wife of a diamond merchant; in the film she wears endless Yves Saint Laurent raincoats, a black one, a red one, then a grey one, she smokes incessantly and takes sleeping pills, attends dinner parties, secretly guzzling the dregs from other guests wine glasses. Every time she passes a mirror, she stops, tilts her head to one side and makes a little snort of self disgust … on the staircase of a clinic where she goes to dry out, in beautifully subdued lighting, the camera passes over the paper planes of her face and for about 15 seconds she looks like Michael Jackson …

Something I’ve never noticed before in the photo of you in the metal frame on my bedside cabinet- I’ve seen that photo probably every day and night for twenty years and I’ve never noticed before … I’ve decided finally its not you: even though its thirty years since we first met and now we’re strangers, despite all my attempts … almost like we never met and all the while you were someone else … now you’re standing there, looking down at me, you unbutton your shirt, then quickly tug at your belt, undo your flies …

In the photograph I’m always drawn to the eyes first, then to your sun browned arms leaning on the table, the sleeves of your white T.shirt and the blue of the thermal vest, all seem to heighten, compliment each other: back to the eyes that are creased in a smile, I can see a pause behind whatever your were thinking at that second, then you fixed a friendly but detached gaze at the person taking the photo – 8×5 fuji colour snap; your left eye seems to almost twinkle with mischief, while the right eye reads worried …

Catherine Deneuve, stands by the window in a green crushed velvet dressing gown, she’s smoking one those long dark cigarettes – a Nat Sherman, I think. She crosses to the bed, sits on the edge and rolls her tights down to a pile on the rug, lies back on the bed and mutters something like ’le vache’ then curls up in a foetal position and asks ‘’rub my feet, will you?’’ to a man in the room. She tells him she called him, because she didn’t want to be alone, she was drunk and had taken a couple of sleeping pills. She does virtually the same scene again towards the end of the film, in a hotel room by the sea with a different man: grey raincoat, cigarette, glass of water, takes two sleeping pills, telling the man ‘’ah but I won’t sleep’’ he says ”why take them then?’’ she replies ‘’oh you know, old habits’’.

Bertie Marshall is the author of The Peeler (2018), Nowhere Slow (2014), Berlin Bromley (2006) — his critically acclaimed memoir about his life as part of The Bromley Contingent and mid 70s pre-punk London — and Psychoboys (1997). In 2015 the British Library purchased his writing archive. Marshall gives regular performances of his work in NYC, Berlin and London.