Say what you like, but history is shit. It's dirty, and it smells - with good reason, because it has provided the visceral energy which brought the present moment to where it is. This present is like our bodies: they look so clean, because they're washed every day, but they leave little piles everywhere behind them. Past presents digested, excreted and left for posterity - and our later selves - to smell.

As I sat in Howie's office, in the small hours and alone, I felt as if I was sitting in the midst of a hundred piles of shit, the smell of each subtly different to the others. When I tried to trace where each had come from I got lost. I couldn't remember the steps clearly enough. It was all too complicated. Time to wipe the hard disk and start again.

Howie had left me by myself for the time being, at my request. I was trying to remember when my life had stopped making sense, when the loops got nested so deep I couldn't see beyond them. You never value simplicity as a child because you're always leaning into the turns, wanting to become older and get your hands on all those older things. Your options are limited, and as such, so simple and free. Each day is a simple progression of activities, not fractured with the demands of the future.

There are countless things you can do when you've grown up, so many calls upon your time. You can smoke. You can drink. You can take drugs. You can work - in fact, you have to because you have to pay bills. Then there are the things you can't do. You have to not goof off, not sleep with other people even if they're available. You have to be happy with where you are and what you've got, when the essence of childhood was the belief that there would always be something new.

The addictions and the mandatories take up so much of your time that you can never simply be. Every thought and every action is informed and undermined by all the other actions or thoughts you have to forgo. You can find yourself haunted by people and events which never even existed, so surrounded by spirits that the real world shades away. You still search for Narnia, even though by then you're too old to believe in it and it doesn't want you there.

Innocence is the freedom from having to have a cigarette every half hour, freedom from loving someone, freedom from the endless fall-out of bad things which you have endured or done. Freedom from time, and all its passing leaves behind it. The countless smells of shit.

The melancholies of youth are to do with not being taken seriously, and the opposite sex. The desperate, biological exposure of that need, the feeling of being left behind when other boys seem to know about smoking and beer and girls - or when other girls had better clothes, a boyfriend of sorts, and tits. Not so much a feeling of being left behind, in fact, so much as a dreadful fear that one was on a subtly differed and less vital curve, one which would never bring you into contact with these exciting, contraband substances.

And yet, when I got those things, I realized the truth in the only movie which really scared me as a child. I thought of the time when I saw Pinocchio on television; and I remembered the way the film spoke to me even though the animation was archaic and two dimensional. I wonder whether my reaction then was a forerunner of what I feel now, if it was an intuitive pre-understanding that these contrabands really would turn you into a donkey, forever tilling someone else's field. But you run for them with open arms anyway, because that's what growing up is about, and only when you stand tired and wet in the rain and mud, the yoke grown so close that it is a part of your shoulders right down to the bone, do you realize what you have done.

I tried to bend the world, and didn't bend enough myself. I wasted so long looking for someone who would light up the forest that I didn't see what I had. Henna was a beacon who would pull me out of the woods, with a strength in her arms which had been put there by my lack of love. I'd stand in front of her, bedraggled and sad in the discovery that what I'd chased was not worth the catching, and believe that Henna never knew what I was really like because I lied. And of course she understood all along, and loved me anyway.

She's not here any more, so there's no one to pull me back. Pinocchio was rescued, and in time turned into a real little boy. The rest of us stand shivering in the rain, and bray.

- Michael Marshall Smith, Spares