Long before any decisions have been made about where or when she might be moving, Sister Nena starts combing the liquor stores early in the morning looking for boxes. She is breaking down the modest contents of her life into three categories: things to keep, things to throw away, things to donate to Catholic Charities. Sister Melanie is doing the same.

‘What’s the rush?’ I ask, picking my way past the long row of boxes that lines the front hall, everything labelled and sealed and neatly stacked. It is August, and the heat and humidity have turned the air into an unbearable soup. I think they’re getting ahead of themselves and I tell them so. Sister Kathy, who is responsible for assessing their situation, won’t be coming from the mother house in North Carolina for weeks.

‘We’ve got to be ready,’ Sister Nena says. She does not stop working. Her state of being is one of constant action, perpetual motion. A small gold tennis racket dangles from her neck where on another nun one would expect to find a cross. ‘I won’t pack the kitchen until the very end.’

Not that the kitchen matters. I suspect that the nuns, who are small enough to emulate the very sparrows God has His eye on, should be eating more, which is why I’ve brought them dinner. Sister Melanie is going to Mercy, the nuns’ retirement home, but she doesn’t know when. Some days she is looking forward to the move, other days she isn’t so sure. She stops and looks in the bag at the casserole I’ve brought, gives me a hug, and ambles off again.

Sister Nena is certain that she doesn’t want to go to Mercy. She regards it as the end of the line. She’s hoping to land in a smaller apartment by herself, or maybe with another sister, though finding a new room-mate at the age of seventy-eight can be a challenge. ‘It’s up to God,’ she says, then she goes back to her boxes.

We brought rings and two witnesses to the Edenvale Home Affairs office because we had been told to.

It was 22 February 2009. I had gone to the office, located on a scrappy strip of motor-repair shops and panel beaters east of Johannesburg, to book our ceremony three weeks previously. My partner, C, and I had been together for nearly two decades, but we had little interest in the rites of marriage. We had decided to do it, now, solely because it would facilitate our move to France, where he had been offered a job. It was, we told each other, merely an administrative matter.

Three years before, the South African parliament had passed a law permitting same-sex marriage, upon injunction from the Constitutional Court. We could have done it more easily – through a gay rabbi I know, for example, or a gay judge who is a friend – but we wanted to see the system work for us. Even though we lived on the other side of town, we chose Edenvale because friends had had a positive experience there. Like all Home Affairs offices, it was grimy and arcane, contemptuous and chaotic; the last place on earth you would want to get married. In the old days, Home Affairs had been the processing room of apartheid: it told you who you were and where you could (and could not) be. It was still a place of profound alienation; of a million frustrations and rages a day.

And I was about to have one of them: I had been waiting in the queue since 2.30 p.m., and had only made it to the front just after 3 p.m. Although the office closed at half past three, processing stopped half an hour before, and I was just too late. I would have to come back the next day. I was on the brink of a spirited lecture on the meaning of ‘Batho Pele’, the department’s new slogan of ‘People First’, when one of the women behind the desk looked up at me, gold hoops in her ears to match her attitude, and barked: ‘Same sex or opposite sex?’

It took me a moment to comprehend. ‘Same sex,’ I said, a little too loudly, glancing round to see if any of the other clerks in the room would look up in shock, or perhaps just interest. They did not.

Dublin in the mid­-1970s. Nine years old. It was a school day, but my father had brought me to work at his newspaper, the Evening Press, where he was features and literary editor. We climbed the stairs to his small third­floor office. There were more books than wallpaper. On the floor, magazines and papers lay open as if speaking to each other. I sat in his swivel chair and spun. He worked on some articles, drew up a couple of layouts, ran his red pencil through a few words, his daily grind.

Outside, just barely visible through the window grime, ran the long grey sentence of the River Liffey.

Later in the morning we went to the library, the darkroom, the canteen. The further we went along, the more the building seemed to hum. We descended the stairs to the newsroom. A wash of noise – television chatter, telephones with their ringers set high, the hammer of typewriter keys. Copy boys scurried across the floor. Editors shouted into headsets. Photographers called out to one another. Pneumatic tubes ferried copy to the upstairs offices. Reporters jostled large rolls of paper into their Olympias, began their hunt and peck.

I am aware that according to present­day criteria, the story I am about to tell contains several shocking scenes which fall within the realms of sexual harassment and cruelty towards animals. A more lenient judge would at least mention inappropriate attitudes, male chauvinism, breach of trust and/or authority – all the terms one uses today for many good reasons and which I do not contest. However, this story is probably no more violent than it is erotic. Sorry. It appears to me to be sexual, but I’m not sure. In any case, it’s true, down to the slightest detail, which is something after all.

At Gregori’s, once you’ve paid your twenty dollars and checked your clothes and shoes with the friendly men in the antechamber to the left, you are given a mask – the small black kind, like Zorro’s. Stretch the elastic a little, you’re told, then slip the mask on carefully; there are only enough to go around and they break easily. Once it’s on, you hear your own breathing. The almond­shaped openings restrict the field of vision a little: you look straight ahead, the periphery of your gaze softens in an oval of darkness. Now you’re ready to enter the party.

War correspondent Janine di Giovanni returns to Bosnia in search of the friends and colleagues she left behind when reporting the siege in the early 1990s. There, in her search for Nusrat, the orphan boy she befriended fifteen years ago, she discovers that the scars of war never truly heal and that some of its victims are lost forever.

When I was seven, I sat down to draw God. God wore a pirate shirt, purple harem pants and a red fez. He sat in cross-legged meditation, the toes of his spangled slippers pointing up. I had a sense that Lord of Hosts would wear His hair as Dorothy Hamill wore hers (and as I wore mine) and so I gave God a bowl cut.

For copyright reasons this short story is unavailable online. To read ‘God and Me', purchase Granta 93 online.

Mexico’s Rural 44 is the only road that leads from his ranch to the cantinas of Valparaiso. Unless he decides to spend the night in a bordello, eventually he will be on that road. But there he is, standing at the bar, one foot propped up on the chrome rail, the heel of his cowboy boot wedged against it, his hand wrapped around a beer, the musicos playing a corrido just for him.

I became a writer thanks to a mother who was unhappy being a mother. She was a prisoner-of-war mother, banging on the bars of her cell all her life. Unhappy women do this. She searched for escape routes from her prison and found them in museums, public concerts and the public library.

I call it a travelling icon. It is slate, heavier than it looks: dull brown in colour, a little longer and wider than the palm of my hand. On one side, roughly incised, a crucifixion, and on the other a Madonna and Child. It is a triptych. On the fold-out doors are saints and patriarchs. They have big wobbly heads. They are all smiling, except for those at the foot of the cross.

Almost two years ago I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, still a kitten, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don’t know for certain. For two weeks after he disappeared people claimed to have seen him; I trusted two of the claims because Gattino was blind in one eye, and both people told me that when they’d caught him in their headlights, only one eye shone back. One guy, who said he saw my cat trying to scavenge from a garbage can, said that he’d looked ‘really thin, like the runt of the litter’. The pathetic words struck my heart. But I heard something besides the words, something in the coarse, vibrant tone of the man’s voice that immediately made another emotional picture of the cat: back arched, face afraid but excited, brimming and ready before he jumped and ran, tail defiant, tensile and crooked. Afraid but ready; startled by a large male, that’s how he would’ve been. Even if he was weak with hunger. He had guts, this cat.

My mother thought I was the menopause. She came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t in Buckreddan Maternity Home in Kilwinning, because that was where women went. In those days, the medical profession gave out the impression of no choice. Labour meant Buckreddan: QED. That the name maternity home suggested duress and distress was probably not intentional, but the suggestion was there nonetheless. I was sixteen before I found out what Buckreddan looked like, by catching sight of the name on a placard as I shot by on a bus. Red Victorian sandstone, almost a hotel. I had always imagined a poorhouse, women in rows in narrow single beds with thin sheets, the occasional nurse with an origami hat like Florence Nightingale. I had always imagined grey, cold, stern. Now I saw the real thing, it looked fine. I tried instead to picture its ranks of babies, me among them somewhere, but couldn’t. All I could muster was the sound of them, crying. I couldn’t picture the absurdly named delivery suites, since I had no idea what delivery was or what such a suite might contain. But I could imagine bottles. That was what we got then; we got powdered milk – formula – in bottles.

It just wasn’t his strong suit. He hardly did it. He barely kept it, and as he got older he cared even less about the consequences of not doing his paperwork. It wasn’t a form of learnt absent-mindedness or elderly decline. It wasn’t a kind of shallow front or brittle bravado but a cussed indifference to authority, a refusal to live with fear of any kind. The old man really didn’t give a fuck what happened.

The summer I turned twenty-five, I met my parents for a vacation in northern Spain. On our first night together, we went for a stroll by the sea. Along the stretch of a deserted coastline, we happened to glimpse a cafe by the water, suspended in a perfect evening, cool and blue, its wicker tables flickering with candles. ‘Let’s go have a glass of wine,’ my father said. But we were tired – my parents had just flown from Russia, I from America. It was only our first evening here, my mother and I said. Let’s not rush things; we’ll come back. ‘We’ll never come back,’ my father replied. ‘Things that aren’t done right away are never done.’ We laughed, but he was right: we stayed there for two weeks, and every evening something happened to prevent us from returning.

I don’t know how I became a dealer. It snuck up on me. I began collecting as a boy in Washington DC, laying down a lifetime pattern of wanting and hunting, of desire, frustration and occasional satisfaction.

From my upstairs windows in Llanystumdwy, near Cricieth in Gwynedd, I can look out on Cardigan Bay, and the sea runs through our house – not literally, of course, but metaphorically, or perhaps emotionally.

The picture floats. Someone took it in the Seventies, but the white backdrop gives no clue. My dad owned that wide-lapel trench coat for fifteen or twenty years, typical thrifty child of the Depression. (He probably tried to give it to me at some point.) The beard’s trim narrows the time frame slightly, that rakish full-goatee. So often in later years he wouldn’t have bothered to shave his jaw to shape it. Put this in the early Seventies. Somehow it floated into my collection of paper trinkets, ferried off to college, then to California for a decade. The only copy. By the time I showed it to my father, last week, he hadn’t seen the photograph for thirty-odd years. He couldn’t be sure of the photographer, guessing at three friends with comically overlapping names – Bobby Ramirez, Bob Brooks, Geoff Brooks. (I remember all three of them, beloved rascals from my parents’ hippie posse.) He settled at last on Geoff Brooks. The picture was never framed, nor mounted in an album, just shifted from file cabinet to cardboard box to file cabinet all this time. A scrap of Scotch tape on the left corner reminds me I had it taped up over a desk in Berkeley. In a family that, after my mother’s death, scattered itself and its memorabilia to far corners of the planet, and reassembles now sporadically and sloppily, the picture’s a survivor. But I’ve lived with it for thirty years, gazed into its eyes as often, strange to say, as I have my father’s living eyes.

And it shows Richard Lethem as I dream him, my idol. His Midwestern kindness, prairie-gazer’s soul, but come to the city, donning the beatnik garb, become the painter and poet and political activist he made himself, a man of the city. When I first knew my parents they were, paradoxically, just the two most exciting adults on the scene, part of a pantheon of artists and activists and students staying up late around the dinner table and often crashing afterwards in the extra rooms of the house. My parents were both the two I had the best access to and the coolest to know, the hub of the wheel. I wasn’t interested in childhood, I wanted to hang out with these guys. The picture shows my dad meeting the eyes of a member of his gang, both of them feeling their oats, knowing they were the leading edge of the world. I wanted him to look at me that way. He often did.