One Word Kill (Impossible Times, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

In general, I found other people to be a far greater mystery than, say, integral calculus, which my friends at school assured me was supposed to be difficult.

If you ignore the words, there’s an honesty in the emotion that fleets across faces in conversation.

‘The equations that govern the universe don’t care about “now”. You can ask them questions about this time or that time, but nowhere in the elegance of their mathematics is there any such thing as “now”. The idea of one specific moment, one universal “now” racing along at sixty minutes an hour, slicing through the seconds, spitting the past out behind it and throwing itself into the future . . . that’s just an artefact of consciousness, something entirely of our own making that the cosmos has no use for.’

Their confidence partly filled the hole left when mine ran for the hills.

If crisp white linen and no-nonsense smiles could cure cancer nobody would ever die of it. Sadly, these were merely the window dressings of the National Health Service.

It’s always a shock, when you’ve been hit by some calamity, to see the world go about its business with perfect indifference.

It doesn’t matter what the doctors say, there’s no fatal disease that doesn’t feel contagious to the person sitting next to you.

The voices of a dozen responsible adults rose along with the hand lifting it toward my mouth. Their protests rang in the back of my mind: Mrs Green, a favourite teacher in my second year, shrill, denouncing; Mother, stern and disappointed; Mr Stanley from chess club, disapproving. I blocked them out. I had cancer. The biggest C. Why not live a little? Taste what was on offer before the fates swept it all beyond my reach.

My mouth had gone too dry for words. I kept swallowing. I wanted to piss. I was every rabbit in every headlight, waiting to be road kill.

What really matters in real life, though, is how far you’re prepared to go and how quickly.

‘I knew that,’ said Simon. ‘I know you did,’ said Elton. ‘But knowing a thing and employing that knowledge when it’s useful. Those aren’t the same things.’

If I was going to die young, I wanted to at least squeeze the juice out of life rather than pick at it. But you can’t change who you are. Not even with a gun to your head.

Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.

I couldn’t blame Simon. He wasn’t wired like regular people, and it went beyond the pocket calculator in his head. He couldn’t deal with change. Even good change was bad. And bad change . . . well, that could make him lose it.

I’d been presented with a mystery. I could focus on that, or I could worry about leukaemia chewing its way through the marrow of my bones. No contest really.

Mother stayed where she was, her smile fixed in that way we Brits use to show we wholly disapprove of something.

I’d always had the sense of a whole life ahead of me, an endless series of sunrises and sunsets. A decade seemed like forever, and it would take two of them just to reach the age my mother was right now. Cancer had closed that down. Like the big C, curling in on itself, my view of the future had narrowed to tunnel vision, aimed squarely at the next week, next month . . . would I have a next year? I was carrying not only the burden of my sickness but the pressure of making something worthwhile of each day now that my towering stack of them had fallen into ruin and left me clutching at each hour as it slipped between my fingers.

The thing about cancer, and I guess any disaster, is that it doesn’t just go away. You don’t wake up. And, in the end, you just have to get on with things exactly like everyone else does.

When Elton called something spicy it meant it would remove the skin from most other people’s tongue.

Fear is a strange thing. Along with its close friend, pain, fear is a vital part of the kit that evolution has furnished us with for keeping alive. Part of its effectiveness comes down to how hard it can be to overcome.

we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it.

Truth may often be the first casualty of war, but dignity is definitely the first casualty of disease.

Simon shot out of the car faster than anyone of his girth should have been able to. I suspect most teenage boys could win the hundred metres in an attempt to outdistance parental embarrassment.

The chemo’s job was to strip my leaves and keep them gone. My job was not to get uprooted while the gale blew.

We might live in a multiverse of infinite wonder, but we are what we are, and can only care about what falls into our own orbit.

I guess every generation thinks it’s born into the golden age of music, but that night it was easy to believe that nobody had had it as good as we did.