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People imagined poems were wispy things, she said, frilly things, like lace doilies. But in fact they were like claws, like the metal spikes mountaineers use to find purchase on the sheer face of a glacier. By writing a poem, the lady poets could break through the slippery, nothingy surface of the life they were enclosed in, to the passionate reality that beat beneath it. Instead of falling down the sheer face, they could haul themselves up, line by line, until at last they stood on top of the mountain. And then maybe, just maybe, they might for an instant see the world as it really is.
We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be. So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not.
This town’s sewage system is two hundred years old. It was never meant for the kind of use it’s getting now. New estates, building on floodplains. Then add global warming to the mix? No, he says, and he starts screwing a thin rod into another thin rod. You’re saying it won’t last? Dad says. I’m saying it’s being put under enormous pressure, Victor says. Enormous pressure. The tone is doomy. But Dad’s eyes are alight. Dad likes talking to Victor. Victor is one of the few people in town who knows about the things Dad knows about – Nazis and Napoleon and the fall of the Mayans, the terrible roll
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They’re walking through the woods again. Heat rises in green waves from the ground, falls from above in slabs of light. PJ’s feet are in agony, he can almost hear them cry out. Around him the forest feels vast. It’s not so big on a map, but once you step inside it, it goes on for ever, and the thought comes to him, could he live out here? Like, could he live out here?
Red, a bad-luck colour;
I never stopped believing, Nev says emotionally. You said we wouldn’t see sex in a wood, but I never gave up hope.
She had disappeared turned into steam mixed in with the dry ice while her body careered pell-mell into sin
Some places are like that Always with a shadow on them
And she who had thought it was only a game feels in her stilled heart that her whole life rests on this moment
But sometimes a very slight difference is all it takes isn’t it
The frost burned in the fields the sun burned on the water the same birds as always circled in the sky
you only notice things the first time and the last time
Didn’t it feel like they had the TV on mute And try as they might they couldn’t turn up the volume
He used to love running his hands through her hair It was curly then she was still on the tabs Rapunzel Rapunzel let down your hair he would say And she would untie it and it would fall down over him and around his face making a little cave with her face the ceiling and his face the floor she the sky and he the ground beneath her
And she thought she would burn up into cinders for love of him
The day had worn creases into his face
The days cascading sleeplessly into each other Empty in roaring silence She didn’t notice herself either Didn’t notice the days disappear and the world with them so quiet so calm that it didn’t feel like madness
she was empty at last and nothing and free It was unbearable Still to be here To be alive still
The light falling through her She was dying then Quietly piece by piece so no one would notice her go
Imelda felt strong Strong and evil This must be her true self she thought
you can’t be clever and complicated and have everyone like you That is just not how it works
Unbearable What an unbearable thing is a life
Irony was the university’s lingua franca; it made it impossible to know if someone was being serious, or making fun of you.
History’s just a pair of knickers. Pull ’em off and what do you find?
Before he became a father, he imagined the relationship as being like an intensive version of owning a pet. The child, he thought, was essentially passive, a vessel into which you poured your love. On TV that’s how it looked. Children were silent, dormant; you went into their bedrooms, gazed down at them fondly, drew the blankets over them as they slept. But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was
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The past for sale.
You can’t stop me being proud of you,
Being good, he discovered, was no good. No one loved you for being good, except God, presumably, and even there he was beginning to have his doubts.
rights are – as indeed people say of children themselves – only ever on loan to us. Where they become sufficiently inconvenient to the powerful, those rights can be revoked in an instant.
people said things that they didn’t mean in order to suggest what they did.
This thing about looking into someone’s eyes. If you’re talking about making a connection, the term is quite misleading. He looked into people’s eyes all the time. What’s really happening in these moments is that you find yourself looking at their eyes – that is, the gaze stops at the eye itself, arrested by the beauty of it; and their gaze does the same at yours; and the two gazes and your souls behind them skate off each other, swirl over each other, like mercury on mercury, so that standing quite still you feel yourself spin out of control, around and around, like a car aquaplaning, until
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in the grey light of November the woods were even more beautiful than before. White leaves sparkled on the ground, like sequins fallen from a gown; the birds called to each other with a note of urgency, as if they were late for an appointment. There was an air of departure, of Nature clearing out for the winter.
being up above it all the time, you never really get a feel for how much ground there is in the ground, how much earth there is to the earth, what it takes for us to have something to walk on.
A pessimist will never be a great salesman,
he would wake up screaming, imagining boots were kicking down the door. That went on for months. It came back even worse when Imelda was pregnant with Cass. Now he had something to lose. He couldn’t just climb out the window and run. He couldn’t take an overdose or put a plastic bag over his head, couldn’t simply let himself be annihilated. He would have to fight, he would have to try to protect them, even though he knew it was impossible to win. You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to
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The past remains with us, in all kinds of unexpected ways. If we haven’t made peace with it, it will come back again and again.
progress takes failure and turns it into the future.
I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common. We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place.
the air of benign indifference
Once his talking lost its power, once you saw through it, there was really little left to him.
time itself seeming to fizz and pop, to strain against the staid succession of moments
it was easy to be blithe, to be carefree, to speak truly and from the heart, when you knew you would never hit Send.
People are always saying they do things for love,
The worst crimes in the world, they’ll use love to justify it.
a suit of armour made of dandelion clocks.
The stars swam before his eyes, unpinned from their constellations, the lights of the city floated unmoored from the street lamps.
Killing or fucking seemed at the same vertiginous pitch, a literal knife-edge poised high, high in the black vault of the night. As if all this were happening in mid-air, remote from every other part of his life and at the same time with the potential to destroy all of it.
For one ecstatic second, he feels himself swept up in the forest, distributed through it. Passing from tree to tree, a spirit.
That’s the past, isn’t it. You think it’s behind you, then one day you walk into a room and it’s there waiting for you.
the truth of myself horrified me.
