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‘I don’t think he meant to,’ Mum said but it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you did accidentally and Mum knew that.
She could have started up a branch library (or a spectacular house fire) with the amount of books she had piled around the place.
‘Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’
Only room for one addict in the family and her mother had had no intention of giving up her place.
Really, every time a person said goodbye to another person they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.
Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.
The train terminates at Waverley the old woman had said, but she was wrong after all. It terminated here.
He remembered lying on the road after his showdown with the sheep this afternoon (really only this afternoon?) looking at the pale sky. There were days that really surprised you with the way they turned out.
a couple of previous occasions when Jackson had found himself facing the possibility of death he had clung on to life because he considered himself too young to die. Now it struck him that that wasn’t really the case any more, he felt plenty old enough to die.
Louise’s possessions looked like a refugee’s beside his, a refugee who spent a lot of time in IKEA.
Louise knocked back the rest of the wine in her glass and searched for her own inner adult. Found her. Lost her again.
She didn’t add that Ms MacDonald was Rapture Ready, that she embraced the end of all things and was expecting to live eternally in a place that when she described it sounded a bit like Scarborough.
‘I died,’ he said to a new doctor. ‘Briefly,’ she said dismissively as if you had to be dead a lot longer to impress her. Dr Foster, a woman, who didn’t seem to want to be on first-name terms. ‘But technically …’ he said, too weak to pursue the argument. She sighed as if patients were always bickering about their dead or alive status. ‘Yes. Technically dead,’ she conceded. ‘Very briefly.’
When would they let him go home? ‘How about when you know where you live?’ Dr Foster offered. ‘Fair enough,’ Jackson said.
‘Happy Meal,’ Alison said with her thin-lipped smile, not a smile at all. ‘Not had many of them.’
‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’ Alison said halfway through the movie. ‘Well …’ Louise said. Which she could see wasn’t really the right answer.
She had made a terrible mistake, hadn’t she? She had married the wrong man. No, no, she had married the right man, it was just that she was the wrong woman.
She had been his least favourite of the three of them, and now she was the only one and she still wasn’t the favourite.
It would be a shame if it turned out that she had saved the life of an evil human being when she could have saved someone who was developing the cure for cancer or who was the only support of a large, needy family, perhaps with a small crippled child in tow.
She could imagine him saying, Maybe it was the right place at the right time. He was the most annoying person, even in her imagination.
Don’t worry,’ she added, ‘when you’re my age you’ll be hard and unfeeling too.’ ‘Expect I will, boss.’
Driving with one hand didn’t unnerve him as much as driving with Reggie Chase in the passenger seat.
He had never had a front-seat passenger apart from Marlee who could get so much enjoyment from the A1.
‘I never had a full set of parents,’ a small voice in the back interjected. ‘I often wondered what it would be like.’ ‘Probably not like this,’ Marcus said.
You would think it was exactly the kind of situation in which a person would call the police – kidnap, murder, self-defence, etcetera – but no, apparently not.
He still belonged to her but she wasn’t sure she wanted him any more.
