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The only way anyone can afford to buy a house these days is to have bought it fifteen years ago.
You can think something often enough, but you will never be prepared for your heart disintegrating.
If you have any sort of personality, someone will eventually want to kill you.
She was never in any danger of running out of money, but she had been in danger of running out of acclaim. Of running out of fame, the sparkling tonic she has long been able to add to the neat gin of her private life.
“I never take offense,” says Tony. “Saved me a lot of time over the years.”
Everyone is vulnerable. For some people, for Steve, it comes out as fear, avoiding situations where the vulnerability is exposed. For others, for an awful lot of people these days, vulnerability comes out as anger, pushing away anything that feels like it might pierce their shell. Steve watches people on TV sometimes, shouting the odds about this, that, or the other, railing against the truth of reality, and he always sees the pain first. They have lost someone, or they never had someone, and so now they have lost themselves.
“Did Steve see the body?” Felicity asks. “We don’t need to hear about all this,” says Tony. Felicity smiles at Tony. “I can’t believe you talked about a Ford Sierra instead of this.” “It’s a Sierra Cosworth,” says John. “To be fair to Tony.” “I just didn’t want you to think that the New Forest is all murders,” says Tony. “There are ponies, all sorts.” “I can handle ponies and murders,” says Felicity. “She’s a keeper,” says Jyoti.
I hope it was a relief that I hadn’t suddenly written a seven-hundred-page meditation on the capriciousness of memory set among the asparagus farmers of fourteenth-century Italy.
Readers often ask me if any of my characters are based on people I know, and they very rarely are. But I can confirm that Trouble is based, in very large part, on my constant writing companion, Liesl Von Cat. Liesl actually managed to delete an entire paragraph of the story for the first time ever this year. Can’t wait to see what she has in store next time.
