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Normally, it would be on instinct. But for this, he felt the need to find the album that encapsulated everything he loved about her.
their excited applause sounding like rain on a windowpane.
They were with her, cheering her on.
The music chased after her words, but she was always too quick, always too quick.
He felt incredibly fragile all of a sudden, like his bones were made of rotten wood.
Peggy looked like she was thinking and feeling a hundred different things at once.
A woman appeared from a bush and dragged the man away from the bird, but to Andrew’s horror this was only so she could continue the assault herself. He was still recovering from having witnessed this harrowing tag-team display as he was ushered into his lodgings by the landlady.
and Andrew quickly realized she had a good heart underneath her stern exterior. She
She also had an unnerving habit of slipping in criticism halfway through an unrelated sentence:
“Don’t worry about that feller and the pigeon, my love, he’s bit of a funny one, that lad—gosh, you need a haircut, m’duck—I
I think he’s one sandwich short of a picnic, ...
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He was savvy enough to work out that philosophy was going to attract a certain type,
but it was as if they’d all been grown in a lab somewhere purely to annoy him.
Gavin who drank neat gin and claimed to have once seen a flying saucer going over Llandovery rugby ground,
Andrew quickly realized that Gavin was obviously the biggest
fool of all, constantly testing Diane’s patience in increasingly creative ways.
“I came home once to find him trying to cook chicken nuggets in the toaster.”)
Unembarrassed at being caught in the act, she would hold his gaze for a second before rejoining the conversation.
where snow was falling in thick clumps.
By the time he opened his eyes again there was a carpet of snow. “You know I’m going
“What about a carrier pigeon?” “Oi!”
“Sorry, it’s just you are talking a little bit like you’re being shipped off to a war somewhere, not Tooting.”
He moved into the spare room of a house currently occupied by two Dubliners who’d just discovered speed, and
(He tended to side with the one who looked most likely to set fire to something if he wasn’t declared the winner.)
He’d found work behind the till in a video rental store exclusively patronized by shifty-eyed drunk men buying porn,
working in a porno shop?” Diane asked him. “What happened to you making decisions, or is this really the height of your ambition? You need to find out what you want to do for yourself. If you’re not going to finish your degree you need to work out how you’re going to have a career.”
She waved away his protests.
She put her hands on the sides of his face and squeezed, turning his mouth into a comedy fish. “You need to believe in yourself a bit more and just bloody get out there. What’s your dream job, your dream career?”
She released the fish and waited for ...
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Diane narrowed her eyes, searching his face for signs of facetiousness.
she moved down the bed and blew a fierce raspberry on his belly.
“Oh yeah? Brokering deals for drug-dealing informants, that sort of thing?”
“Wanking helps me with the come-downs,”
for an interview might have been hired by Gavin as some sort of cruel act of revenge.
He decided that the optimism of the title was a good
“Yes, Andrew, I’m joking. Hamish Brown accidentally touched my boob while trying to fix an overhead projector last week, that’s about as close as I’ve come to cheating on you . . .”
Despite himself, Andrew spent possibly 70 percent (okay, 80; 90, tops) of the time worrying about Diane’s being enticed away by someone. He always pictured a floppy-haired rower called Rufus, for some reason. All broad shoulders and old money.
(“We really need to work on your benchmarks,” Diane
who were surprisingly emotional (though
sort of building with scuff marks on the corridor walls and a dewy smell about the place—but
Their moving coincided with a summer that brought with it a fiercely cloying heat.
July was particularly punishing.
People eyed each other nervously on the tube, looking out for potential fainters.
Roads cracked and split. Garden
she affected a deep, booming voice—“‘If
Diane blew the froth from her beer at him.
The rain came while the city slept, a deluge of greasy water pounding the streets. Andrew
“Have you got a hurty-head?” he said.
“I’ve got a hurty-everything,”
He felt her grip
