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Rod strongly suspected that, when the commissioning ministers shared their brief with the architects, they had simply said, “You know that warehouse bit at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Like that but underground, with wipe-clean surfaces, energy-saving light bulbs and decent air-con.”
“Rod, where are you?” “With the otters.” “Otters aren’t sea life, are they?” “I don’t think they snuck in illegally or anything.”
“Mmmm. You never had children, did you?” Vivian considered the smiley face she’d drawn next to ‘Random baby’. Maybe it wasn’t as good an idea as she thought. “I’m not the selfish type, Rod,” she said.
The woman smiled like someone who had learned how to do it from a YouTube video but not previously tested it out on another human being.
“Then your eyesight must be defective,” Morag snapped and got into the lift. “Too much staring at arses probably.”
“This place probably hasn’t changed in a hundred years,” said Rod. “’cept maybe the electric lights.” “And the dead body.”
Morag woke up and did not die. She dressed and left for work and still did not die. She caught the train, bought something unhealthy to eat for breakfast as she walked to the office and still she did not die. She swiped herself into the Library, said good morning to Security Bob and continued to not die.
I have an ambivalent attitude towards child murder.
“There are so many nuggets of purest wrong in what you’ve just said, I don’t know where to start.”
“I can’t tell when you’re being sarcastic and when you’re being serious.” “Neither can I,” she agreed.
“Life is strange, isn’t it?” “Compared to what?”
“Do you want the truth? A lot of things in this world hurt us and cause us pain. A small number of things do not. The only meaning to life involves avoiding the former and finding the latter. Death is the end of all of them, the good things and the bad ones. There is no more meaning than that.”
Although, she thought, clergymen, vacuous PR people and an invitation to sit down and share one’s feelings probably featured frequently in many people’s ideas of torture.
No, on reflection, it was nothing like a bouncy castle at all, unless it was a bouncy castle dredged from the worst nightmares of someone with a chronic fear of castles.
“My parents used to laugh when I said I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. Well, no one’s laughing now, are they?”
“So, this is how the world ends,” said Nina. “Not with a bang but with —” “This is an alarm. Could all customers please make their way to the nearest exit.”
