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Terseness was her only weapon. From the outside it probably looked useless, because the words would keep coming, but any attempt to answer the question would result in an unstoppable torrent.
You had to discover the theme before you could get the solutions, and you had to get the solutions before you discovered the theme. She seemed to spend most of her life doing that.
Lucy knew lots of people who sent their kids to private schools, and they never failed to make a mess of explaining how they had arrived at their decision. The reasons usually involved some kind of complex, barely comprehensible sensitivity that prevented the child from attending the local comprehensive, so even though the parents would have loved to send them up the road, it just wouldn’t work in this particular case, what with the shyness, or the undiagnosed dyslexia, or an extraordinary talent that needed the kind of excavation and nurture the state was in no position to provide. Lucy
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There had always been tarts and slags and sluts, and now there were fuckboys, and the contempt with which the girls spat the word out gladdened her heart.
She was glad that Joseph had no access to her mind, because then he would know that she was almost certainly patronizing him.
She wondered too whether one of them would ever say, it’s fucking great! I see them and I pay for their upkeep but the rest of the time is my own. She doubted it. For a start, it wasn’t allowed. She’d have to withhold all sexual and emotional contact from a man like that, however refreshing the sentiment.
“I take it back,” he said. “There’s only one kind.” “Sorry?” “Just . . . what we were saying. Aargh. Forget it.”
Perhaps the secret to a successful relationship was to pay someone ten pounds an hour, every hour.
Grace looked at him, and he could tell she knew that Lucy wouldn’t be his mother’s age, even if they’d been born at the same time on the same day in the same year. They decided, collectively and telepathically, that this was not an observation anyone wanted to articulate.
But the weird thing about being his age was that you spent half your time dreaming about what might happen to you, and the other half trying not to think about it, and either way you were stuck living a life that didn’t seem to count for much,
And maybe there was no future in it, but there was a present, and that’s what life consists of.
His mother could sustain an argument forever, simply by switching sides right in the middle of it.
the people she loathed were all on the other team.
One made a nervous face, another crossed his fingers and held them up, another asked whether she thought it would be all right. It didn’t occur to any of them that she might have voted to leave. And of course she hadn’t, so the presumption was correct. She wanted to stop them all and ask what it was they had invested in the European Union, but she didn’t. She didn’t want them to think she didn’t belong.
didn’t know you were out,” said Lucy. “Why?” “Because he was in,” said Al. “That’s a stupid way to make a political decision,” said Lucy, before remembering that she had voted in exactly the same way. Perhaps that’s how everyone had done it, in the end.
She wanted to listen to people like her say things that she hadn’t thought about,
Oh. OK, she typed, and then deleted the oh, which sounded wounded to her, and, now she came to think about it, was meant to sound that way to him.
“I’m not technically her ex,” said Paul. Daisy and Lucy both looked at him.
She told them all about Sam’s one-pound houses and Joseph’s dad, and her knowledge of elsewhere gave her temporary authority as an expert in how the other fifty-two percent thought. On the whole, though, the guests at the party preferred the narrative about lies, fear, stupidity, and racism. They had lost an argument, and they never lost arguments. They were confused and angry.
Nobody had said the words “I love you,” Lucy noticed, and yet each had found a way of telling the other that they were loved. That seemed like a good place to end.
but seemed to be right on the edge of their social circles,
Hanna claimed to have heard of him, but Joseph was doubtful. How could you have heard of someone who turns up in the kitchens of houses belonging to normal people?)
Who is better in bed? He sent her the rolling-eyes emoji. What is that? Rolling eyes. Not an answer. Out of you and me? Me.
what he really wanted to do was see how many lengths he could manage underwater, and how long he could stand on his hands for. He thought Hanna would think he was immature, so he didn’t, and then he remembered that she wasn’t going to be around for the long term, so he did.
now he was worried that he’d only ever be attracted to women who were being, or had already been, educated out of his league.
The woman seemed to watch the words as they came out of her mouth, and they alarmed her.
when they were plugging in and unplugging electrical devices, the last ritual of the evening.
Lucy didn’t say anything. She wanted to say, “Are you sure?” but she had to time it right. If she said it too quickly he would know that she was the problem, not her parents.
He just seemed to decide that he’d had enough of engaging with the world around him, or the people who lived in it. Or maybe he had simply come to the conclusion that the people he knew best had said everything they had to say, but they said it again anyway, and he was unwilling to go around for a third or fourth time.
