Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

It’s as if the people of London have converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens, and street corners to revel in the great collective joys of being alive, everyone but you, they seem to say, you loner, squanderer, you who stares longingly at the laughing groups of youth in London Fields.

We are all miserable; miserable at home and miserable out. You always want what you don’t have.

She wanted love enormously, so much so that she felt demeaned by it.

Cynicism is a safety valve: if you accidentally place too many eggs in an unfashionable basket, you need to be able to pretend that the relationship between eggs and basket is, and always has been, part of an ironic metanarrative.

‘I just feel like I’m always waiting for something to happen, like one of these eight million lives is going to collide with mine and knock me off course towards something else. But they never do! Nothing ever happens. People keep their heads down. They mind their own business. People in London are too tired to be colliding with each other all the time.’

she had thought that her peers were glamorous by their own merits, and by extension, that she was plain by her own deficiencies.

He is always hungry and claiming to be full.

you should only ever get what you want for the most extraordinarily brief window of time. The rest of your life, you should spend in the pining.

If the object of your desire were within perpetual reach, it would be worthless. You must only ever graze it.

how strange it is that coffee and eggs on a sunny morning should be such a thrill (such an ordinary thing!).

Whenever he looks at art or nature with friends, he feels obliged to express feelings on it even when he has none, and this discrepancy between feelings spoken and feelings felt gives him the sensation of not existing at all.

just once, she wants to be at the centre of things. No longer an afterthought. No longer a peripheral figure in her own life.

He helped her to see the world as a place where even the oldest, dreariest things could become new again if you only looked at them sideways.

when the moment comes to express some deeper part of herself – say, a memory from childhood or an opinion on a book – she seizes up and finds herself unable to speak, which is to say, she’s sort of invisible to herself as well.

It’s not that she doesn’t have feelings of her own, but as soon as they’re spoken aloud, they sound false, and she’s afraid of revealing something bad about herself.

It wasn’t about the music: he would have danced to the sound of a dripping tap when he was with her.

Ed is blurry, to even himself. His outlines are vague. This is fine except that you need to be solid for other people. To have relationships, to be trusted, you have to say ‘This is me, this is what I want’ and act as if that were true at all times.

He tells her that it feels as if his body were a custom-made, bespoke container, specifically designed for holding this one rare, very precious substance, which is her. That’s how it feels. Like this is what he was made for.

It was like random phenomena of chemistry and physics had spontaneously erupted inside him, like a black hole, like the Big Bang, like in the beginning there was nothing, but now, there were constellations, asteroids, microorganisms evolving into life as we know it.

She learned as a child that things can be tolerated. All you have to do is focus on the details of each second, which are nearly always easier to take than the bigger picture. The bigger picture, of course, is hard to stomach.

she saw a public information film on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. It said to crouch under the table, in the bathtub, get shelter, pray to God, but all Joan could think was that there was no way in hell she’d hide from the bomb. She’d sprint across the city to find him.

That’s when she knew that she loved him: when she started thinking of his death. She knew she’d found something good when she knew she couldn’t stand to lose it.

Their wordlessness is a symptom of their intimacy, so attuned to each other that they are beyond verbal language altogether.

Barely saying a word, these two are understood. They will go home; they will watch telly; they will go to bed. She will turn over onto her side and he will hold her from behind, the same position they have slept in for nearly forty years.

Phil’s body is an illiterate body. It’s a body that doesn’t speak the language. His mind is never not describing the world, an over-articulate mind, a mind that is hyperactive in its desire to narrate, but his body is dumbstruck, bumbling, upset with itself like a child who hasn’t yet learned to speak and becomes enraged when no one understands what is meant by their babbling, their little face scrunched into a small and wounded tantrum.

Louis thought about paying attention as an act of love: he noted all the details of the day because he loved it, and loved Keith too, and that was all there was to it. It was entirely trivial. Truly, nothing had happened, and yet, it was the biggest thing in his life. It was gigantic, the love. The love was like this: it was like every text message was grammatically incorrect if it didn’t include the words ‘I love you’ at the end. It was as if each loveless text were written by an inexperienced speaker of English.

Even when she wants something, her first instinct is to say that she doesn’t. Even when hungry, her first instinct is to say that she’s full.

Sometimes she tries to claw her way out of it. Sometimes she bashes her body off its walls in fury at her inability to climb them. Sometimes she simply accepts the pit and tries to decorate it as best she can.

He thinks again: this is a significant event. He is so busy reminding himself of the event’s significance that the significance becomes abstract.

He wants to be nothing, by which he means not only that he wants to die, but that he wants to have not ever existed at all, for his body and every person’s memory of his body to be instantly and utterly erased from the world.