The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

Any gaol-bird could tell you that for every crime there are two stories, and that an Old Bailey trial is the story of the crime, not the story of the prisoner.

The syrupy way white women move.

Nothing without colour had any good use.

No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.

But, looking back now, I see that your own life can be a story you tell yourself, that you can be both the person reading and the thing being read.

Freedom can’t be bought with anything a woman like me has to spend, but there are numberless choices between lying down or putting up a fight.

rich people’s noises are as rough as anyone’s, except that they can buy thicker walls.

unlike her I could keep my thoughts to myself.

people are strange, and people live in houses, and make them strange

For some things, there’s the same shame in fighting them as accepting them.

There’s no shortage of people who believe I was savage enough to have done it. But some people look at a black and see only a savage, the same way some people will look at arsenic and see only poison.

‘But we are, each of us, sad in our own peculiar ways.’

But now I know how small the space can be, between being afraid of a thing and wanting it.

‘You are writing your own notes in it?’ She followed my gaze. ‘Well, if you choose to make one thing happen in a book, a thousand other things do not. When I read, it’s those thousand other things that I wonder about.’

Good intentions should never attach themselves to bad means.

death should not be the limit of knowledge, that a body could tell us much more alive than dead.

‘Frances Langton, your body might have been currency once, but you own yourself now.

English winter is a season of dying things, of long waiting, and wool-thick skies.

‘No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’

a dead man’s reputation means nothing to a dead man.

Always a courtesan, never a bride, Frances.

We go from birth to death. We go from love to marriage. Of each we may claim an equal understanding, which is to say none at all.

Women focus on what they lack, men on what they want. In all those Bible stories, it’s always the women who look back, who eat the forbidden fruit, who weep over hollow wombs, and fruitful ones. Yearning is always a woman’s sin. The men never turn around, nor ever think twice about taking a knife – or a cross – to their own longed-for sons.

‘There’s no reforming what’s already rotten.’

There’s wickedness in all men. The ones we call good are the ones who care to hide it.

I was a knot, untangled. The weight of all my memories was gone.

‘Oh, there are many ways to be mad,’ she said. ‘Love’s the surest one.’

It is impossible to be both black and a woman. Did you know that? No one was asking me to give any lectures.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

The sky was just turning pink and she wanted to see it curling like a ribbon around the clouds.

But melancholia is not the leap, it is the desire. The constant irrepressible agonizing urge.

Before it begins to eat your insides, opium is like a flame. It is all energy, and at the same time all rest. It pulls close all the meshwork of your own brain. Joys become raptures.

When I think of her, it’s with the kind of love that makes murder seem a lie. But I could have killed him.

The black night crouched, like a watchman, at the glass.

That I was the one submitting, even when it was I who wielded the whip.

Small threads of happiness.

Time was moving away from us as it does for everything, but now it was ticking towards life as well as death.

Oh, I know only too well. It’s butchery when there’s no need to keep the animal alive.

Silence can be a chisel.

The clock’s either as orderly as a multiplication table or as unruly as a fart.

They make us stare at death before we face it.

Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.