Lanny

by Max Porter

I may as well enjoy the car, it cost me enough and it spends most of its life parked, waiting for me.

Does my husband sit on the train and worry that the crushing dullness of Collateralised Loan Obligations might be leaking into Lanny? I doubt it. Does he feel disgusted and ashamed that his phone, which Lanny uses to look up videos of blue whales, is the same phone on which he watches porn, sadly whacking away at himself in the bathroom while I pretend to be dreaming of murder plots? No, he doesn’t. Such burdens are always hers.

No offence intended, Charlotte, there is not a chamber of hell hot enough for a woman of your taste.

What’s grotesque, Theresa, is the ungodly speed of the thing, how quickly a missing child becomes a booming industry. How well-practised must we be?

How can we trust anything? How can we trust other people with our children? How can we trust ourselves? How on earth have humans lived in groups? I knelt down by the stile and prayed. I felt acute despair, I felt that the missing child was the thing we most deserved, the only story left to us, lost children,

The very idea of a safe place is tyrannical.

Her brain and her eyes don’t know what messages to send each other, so there is no resolution.