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I don’t move like that. I wade, tripping over boxes and piles of mildewing curtains, getting caught in cables, hooked on hat stands, and assaulted by rutting ironing boards. I flounder over records, books, stained blankets, greasy collections of plastic bags, garden forks, antique mangles, a woman’s patent leather shoe, and an unopened blender that also grates and peels. And cats, cats, cats.
“A pearl is an everlasting tear,” he whispers. “A swaddled hurt.”
Faced with Bridlemere St. Dymphna narrows her eyes and sucks air in through her teeth like a plumber condemning a boiler.
IT WAS a wild empty place, that beach. A place where the ocean met the sky and the seabirds screamed and reeled in wide, wide, borderless blue.
Wigs often make her overheated and bad-tempered.
DUNES CREEP. Deirdre told me as much. They could move inches when you weren’t looking. If you annoyed them by running over them, or snooping round them, or digging into them they would simply glide over you and you would never be seen again. The sand would fill your mouth, plug your nose, and squash your eyes. You’d suffocate with the whole massive weight of the dune above you.
“Do you know what I’ve learnt from life?” “Is it profound?” “Not at all; it’s very simple. Just be sincere and everything else will follow.”
Memory is like a wayward dog. Sometimes it drops the ball and sometimes it brings it, and sometimes it doesn’t bring a ball at all; it brings a shoe.
“One more thing: that guy you’re with.” “Yes?” “He’s not who he says he is.”
She always has a shrunken, well-rinsed quality after Lillian has been round, like something delicate put on a boil wash with the dog’s towel.
I never knew Granny not to have a sweet in her mouth and I could usually gauge her mood by her consumption of it, for she sucked sweets faster when riled and was known to crunch them when furious.
