The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

‘I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,’

(Charles, in his one attempt at a man-to-man talk with me, had put it rather differently. ‘Get her kit off,’ he said. ‘Play with her tits a bit, because the ladies love that. Then just stick your cock in her pussy and ram it in and out a bit. Don’t hang around too long in there – it’s not a bloody train station.

Words to live by.

‘He tells a story, and that’s what I like. Does this fella tell a story? He doesn’t spend twenty pages describing the colour of the sky?’

‘What’s seldom is wonderful.’

Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.