More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You either cleaned up other people’s messes or you didn’t—and that was the class system for you, right there.
The only reason for the absence of a sign requiring entrants to abandon all hope is that, as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.
Besides, it wasn’t like Shirley was an habitual user. It was a weekend thing with her, strictly Thursday to Tuesday.
Victory, she had once heard someone say, was about ensuring your opponent never again put head to pillow without thinking with hatred on your face.
And if she let him get away with it, she’d wind up in his pocket. Of course, a pocket was a good place to be if you were probing the wearer for soft tissue.
The public was like one of those huge Pacific jellyfish; one enormous, pulsating mass of indifference, drifting wherever the current carried it; an organism without a motive, ambition or original sin to call its own, but which somehow believed, in whatever passed for its brain, that it chose its own leaders and had a say in its own destiny.
Besides, if his party stood for anything, it was for defending the right of the strong to flourish, which meant preventing the weak from taking up unnecessary space.
It’s not like your department’s a jewel in the Service’s crown, after all. It’s more like a slug in its lettuce patch.
That’s daily business, in case you were wondering.” “I can’t stress how much I wasn’t.”
“There’s no I in ‘team,’” Louisa reminded him. “But there’s a U in ‘cunt,’” Shirley muttered.
That a delicacy for the pampered was acquired through brutality was hardly news. By any civilised standard, it was how luxury ought to be measured—wealth meant nothing if it didn’t create suffering. Because the standard liberal whine that the rich were cushioned from life’s harsh realities was laughable ignorance: the rich created those realities, and made sure they kept on happening. That was what kitchens were for, along with prisons, factories and public transport.
“Don’t look so glum,” said Lamb. “You could do with skipping a few.” “Are you even allowed to say stuff like that?” she complained, surrendering the sandwich. “Not sure. Haven’t read the manual.” He examined her offering suspiciously. “Did this get hit by a bus or what? You can buy them new, you know.”
“Jesus. An ex-soldier with a screw loose versus you lot. A bunch of losers with fewer moves than an arthritic tortoise. Wonder how this is going to pan out?”
“That’s good soldiering in my book,” Donovan said. “We’re not on the same side.” “Maybe not,” he said. “But I’d sooner have you as an enemy than these clowns as friends.”
