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she couldn’t believe how young that sounded and how old it felt.
they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.
She wanted their daughter, Marlee, to grow up ‘using the correct anatomical language for genitalia’. Jackson would rather Marlee grew up without knowing genitalia even existed, let alone informing him that she had been ‘made’ when he ‘put his penis in Mummy’s vagina’, an oddly clinical description for an urgent, sweatily precipitate event that had taken place in a field somewhere off the A1066 between Thetford and Diss, an acrobatic coupling in his old F Reg BMW (320i, two-door, definitely a policeman’s car, much missed, RIP).
Yet despite everything he’d seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief – a small, battered and bruised belief – that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad.
That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers.
‘Well,’ Jackson said, ‘how about we remove any emotional significance from those three words and just treat them as two adjectives and a noun. Old. Family. Home. True or false?’
Julia took out a packet of cigarettes and offered him one. She made offering a cigarette seem like an invitation to sex. He could feel the sister’s disapproval from where he sat, but whether it was of the nicotine or the sex he wasn’t sure.
His speciality had been probability and risk, which Amelia didn’t understand at all (he was always trying to demonstrate probability to her by tossing coins), but it struck her as ironic that a man who studied risk for a living had never taken one in his life.
It seemed suddenly very sad to Amelia that the best role of Julia’s career was as a dog. And that she didn’t need a wig to play a poodle.
What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened – how did you live your life then?
Julia was on her knees on the pavement, letting the dog lick her face. Amelia wished she wouldn’t do that, you didn’t know where that dog’s tongue had been – well, you did, and that’s why you didn’t want it washing your face.
Well, that was the end then, she was Americanizing words. Civilization would fall.
Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. For ever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, not the trace of a smile, nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.
No, don’t go there, Jackson, don’t think about Sarah Connor, think about something bad, think about the exhaust on the car that needs fixing, think about something boring. Golf.
Oh, you do, Jackson thought, you lose touch with everyone eventually.
‘There you go, Jackson, all patched up and ready to go.’ Sharon pulled her mask down and smiled at him as if he was three years old. He almost expected her to give him a badge or a sticker.
Sarah Connor type. Or that nurse from ER that all men knew they would treat so much better than her on-screen boyfriends did.
Most people who looked familiar to Jackson usually turned out to be criminals but she didn’t look like a criminal.
‘Are you OK, Jackson?’ and Jackson looked pained and said, ‘That would very much depend on your definition of “OK”, Theo.’
‘Who’s dead now, Amelia?’ he asked when she paused for breath. ‘Because if it’s anything smaller than a large horse I’d appreciate it if you took care of it yourself.’
He said to Theo, ‘That’s good,’ and hoped it was.
