Slade House

by David Mitchell

I said, if anyone at Lady Grayer’s asks how we came here, you’re to tell them we arrived by taxi.” “I thought lying was wrong.” “There’s lying,” says Mum, fishing out the envelope she wrote the directions on from her handbag, “which is wrong, and there’s creating the right impression, which is necessary.

Mum says I have to learn how to Blend In more, but there aren’t any classes for Blending In, not even on the town library notice board.

you have to act normal. Can you do that? Please? Think of the most normal boy in your class, and do what he’d do.” Acting Normal’s like Blending In.

“I’m not in the Scouts anymore,” I remind her. Mr. Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter. I’d been on the local news and everything. Everyone was angry, but I was only following orders.

“Eat a damson, Nathan,” says Jonah, handing me a fruit from the tree. He sits down at the base of one tree, so I sit down against its neighbor. “Thanks.” Its warm slushy flesh tastes of early August mornings.

Doves or pigeons coo in the damson trees. No one’s ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not.

Mrs. Marconi says talking’s like ping-pong: you take turns.

I pass a portrait of a girl, younger than me, plastered with freckles, and wearing a pinafore thing from Victorian times. She’s dead lifelike.

The clock’s really tall. I put my ear against its wooden chest and hear its heart: krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk…It has no hands. It’s got words instead, on its old, pale-as-bone clock face, saying TIME IS and under that TIME WAS and under that TIME IS NOT.

“Paranormal entities don’t come when you whistle,” Angelica tells her. “They’re not like live-in Filipino maids.” I’d be stung by that, but for Fern it’s water off a duck’s back. “It’s ‘Filipina,’ for females, you’ll find—and I’d know, of course, being so awfully, frightfully posh.” Fern places one of her Gauloises cigarettes between her lips and lights it. Angelica’s squished like a bug and I think, Direct hit! and Fern gives me a knowing look.

every instance of undying love was only half an hour young, once upon a time.

People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

not even God can change the past.

Truth has this habit of changing after the fact,

Places change you,

This is war. In war, ends justify means. War is ends justifying means.