More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘Oh, there’s always something going on down there. It’s a never-ending chit-chat between Israel and Hizballah across the border. Like boys taunting each other. Except it’s people’s lives they’re playing with.’
She feels split between two landscapes and climates, two languages, two ways of behaving. Belongs to both and neither.
It is middle C, but no steel string has been struck by a padded hammer; no resonance has been produced by the vibration of that particular string. The sound she hears is a computer-generated noise. It imitates a piano, but it is still not right, like someone speaking in a voice that doesn’t belong to them.
She knows all this, but the door has closed, the latch fallen. The decision is made: there is no going back now. And she will not, cannot, be a hypocrite.
The airport – God, the airport where she arrived only two nights ago, and from where, until this moment, she was intending to leave. How in hell will she get back to London now? The door has closed, the latch fallen.
Fleetingly, she wonders what will happen next. They have shared the zeniths and nadirs of what it means to be alive, but she doesn’t yet know whether that will be a magnet that pulls them together or forces them apart.
Ten-storey buildings that stood across the road yesterday evening are gone. Instead, there are grey heaps and mounds of rubble. Beyond the rubble, a building flops limp, its floors hanging down like cloth from the central spine.
There is nothing but man-made mess. It looks like something she might see advertised on a tube train in the London Underground, a picture of devastation with a phone number underneath for donations.
Soon there will be a new landscape. The snow-capped mountains and blue sea, the clear sky and blazing sun, the dry hillsides and lean, umbrella-topped pine trees will melt away, and below me I will see a neat patchwork of green and yellow fields, dark clumps of trees, and roads pin-pricked with the headlights of moving cars. A world that functions. Perhaps I will return. Or perhaps, with the passing years, the distance will widen, as key by key and note by note, I edge my way into exile.
