Nutshell

by Ian McEwan

Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose. By this late stage they should be refraining on my behalf. Courtesy, if not clinical judgement, demands it.

Anxiously, I finger my cord. It serves for worry beads.

It’s not her love that’s failing. It’s mine. It’s my resentment that falls between us. I refuse to say I hate her. But to abandon a poet, any poet, for Claude!

a philosophy of “personal growth”—a phrase as paradoxical as “easy listening.”

I see—I imagine I see on an untested retina—

There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact: remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.

After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother’s soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason.

There it is. We’ve made another million by not killing my father sooner.

And then I experience not quite joy, but its expectation, a cool uncoiling in my gut.

must wonder why their murderee is here, what he wants, but it wouldn’t be right to ask.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present.

Silence, then it comes, in hard-won dribbles. But he’s loud. A long shout truncated, as though a football fan has been stabbed in the back midchant.

dumped before she could dump, as they say on the afternoon agony-aunt shows. (Teenagers phone in with problems that would stump a Plato or a Kant.)

The man who obliterates my mother between the sheets obeys like a dog. Sex, I begin to understand, is its own mountain kingdom, secret and intact. In the valley below we know only rumours.

Two sharp, well-spaced blows against the wall, using my heel rather than my near-boneless toes.

“Well,” my father says, meaning more than he can know, “I’ll be going.”

have lungs but no air to shout a warning or weep with shame at my impotence. I’m still a creature of the sea, not a human like the others.

The tale has turned tail.

Speaking’s just a form of thinking and he must be as stupid as he appears.

Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings.

He’s over-ordering, a natural impulse after a murder.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said.

If I had breath to hold, I’d hold it now.

For a long time I’ve been almost too big for this place. Now I’m too big. My limbs are folded hard against my chest, my head is wedged into my only exit. I wear my mother like a tight-fitting cap.

Later, I’m woken by voices. I’m on a slope, which suggests my mother is sitting up in bed propped by pillows.

exequy.

I wonder if she has a gun. Too grand. Like the queen not carrying money. Shooting people is for sergeants and below.

A moment of numbness, as if sound itself has been murdered.

travel a section where I know a portion of my uncle has passed too often the other way.

I’m breathing. Delicious. My advice to newborns: don’t cry, look around, taste the air.