In the Woods

by Tana French

The wood is all flicker and murmur and illusion. Its silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises – rustles, flurries, nameless truncated shrieks; its emptiness teems with secret life, scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye.

Having worked hard to perfect an air of easy indifference, I recognise the real thing when I see it.

the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment,

She had tried so hard to live.

I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to shout ‘Shut the hell up,’ or ‘Fuck this case, I quit,’ or something, something reckless and unreasonable and dramatic.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fibre cereals and nicotine patches.

‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’

tragedy is new territory that comes with no guide,

loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia.

the names went straight out of my head the moment their hands slid away from mine,

played with the baby (I couldn’t imagine how; the kid had barely moved all the time we were there, it must have been like playing with a large potato),

‘Did they surgically remove your palate at birth, or did you have to cultivate such an utter lack of refinement?

the whole scene had the glass-covered quality of memory.

It was only much later, in the stale cold light of hindsight, that the little things rose up and rearranged themselves and clicked neatly into place to form the patterns we should have seen all along.

few deaths can match the refined agony of being the one left behind,

dipping chips into barbecue sauce with the glacial concentration of the very drunk.

the whole art of lying is knowing when to stop,

The one joy of migraines is that they make a perfect excuse: they’re disabling, they’re not your fault, they can last as long as you need them to and nobody can prove you don’t have one.

champagne-reception-cum-dance

The marriage had been childless but hardly unproductive:

I wondered, with detached, lucid interest, whether I was losing my mind.

it was the kind of sunny, buoyant day that encourages extravagance.

you little bastard. You ruined my perfectly good sulk.’

We had had inappropriate cappuccinos after dinner,

testosterone-flavoured

a dog, one of those little shites that barks all night;

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.