More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Don’t you swear,” she added automatically. “I’m the only person allowed to swear.”
“You smell of soot,” their father said to their mother. “And cabbage and milk.” “And you smell of failure,” their mother said.
“No room for two creative talents in a marriage,”
Although now there was only one person in the marriage, their mother still didn’t paint.
Everything Joanna had was handed down from Jessica. It was as if without Jessica there would be no Joanna. Joanna filled the spaces Jessica left behind as she moved on.
Nobody heard her when she called back. The dog found her.
it meant she didn’t have to see her only daughter married to a selfish, fornicating waster).
Everything was bad. There was no question about it.
the man had a knife, and he kept raising it in the air, so that it shone like silver in the hot afternoon sun. Her mother started to scream. There was blood on her face, on her hands, on her strong legs, on her strawberry dress. Then Joanna realized that her mother wasn’t screaming at the man, she was screaming at her.
It would have been better to have tried to save the baby and been killed than not trying and living. It would have been better to have died with Jessica and her mother rather than being left behind without them. But she never thought about any of that, she just did as she was told.
the thing that drove her to distraction was that she couldn’t remember what the dog was called.
Two years and three months old. His face was scrunched up with concentration. Vulnerable. He could have picked him
up with one hand, run back to the Discovery, thrown him in the backseat, and driven out of there before anyone had time to do anything. How long would it take for the police to respond? Forever, that was how long.
“Sorry,” he said, turning on the charm. He surprised even himself sometimes with the charm. “I’m a bit lost.” Women could never believe it when a guy admitted to being lost, they immediately warmed to you.
It was very easy to slip between the cracks, especially if you were small.
Reggie liked the way Richard Branson had made Virgin into a huge global brand-name, the way the Catholics had done with Jesus’s mother.
Still, it was good to think that Billy was willing to do things for her, even if they were nearly always illegal things.
she was right.) She could get quite a lot of schoolwork done as well. She wasn’t at school anymore, but she was still following the curriculum. English literature, ancient Greek, ancient history, Latin. Anything that was dead, really. Sometimes she imagined Mum speaking Latin (Salve, Regina), which was unlikely, to say the least.
She could have started up a branch library (or a spectacular house fire) with the number of books she had piled around the place.
Illness hadn’t made her a nicer person; even now she had religion, she was hardly full of Christian charity.
Ms. MacDonald used the imminence of the Rapture and the Second Coming as an excuse (“What’s the point?”), but really she was just a slovenly person.
Ms. MacDonald’s God didn’t really seem the caring sort; in fact, quite the opposite, indifferent to human suffering and intent on reckless destruction.
Now there was a new card on the notice board. It was embossed with “Lothian and Borders Police,” a phone number, and a name, “Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe.”
“I’m very happy,” Dr. Hunter said when she’d recovered, and Reggie said, “Me too.” And the nice thing was that they really were, because it was surprising how often people said they were happy when they weren’t. Like Mum with the Man-Who-Came-Before- Gary.
“He’s like a bear in the morning sometimes,” Dr. Hunter laughed. Living with a bear didn’t seem to bother her. Water off a duck’s back.
Dr. Hunter laughed at Mr. Hunter’s shortcomings and never seemed to get annoyed with him about anything.
When she said Scottish words and phrases, Dr. Hunter said them in a (pretty good) Scottish accent, so it was almost like she was bilingual.
“How long does it take to die from drowning?” she asked Dr. Hunter. “Well, there are quite a few variables,” Dr. Hunter said, “water temperature and so on, but roughly speaking, five to ten minutes. Not long.” Long enough.
Dr. Hunter saw the potential for sadness everywhere.
First things were nice, last things not so much so.
Actually all of these things were true. It was just the being alive bit
that was made-up.
Reggie hoped that one day soon Dr. Hunter might say, “Why go home, Reggie? Why not move in
here?” and then they would be a proper family—Dr. Hunter, Reggie, and the baby and the dog. (“Neil” didn’t really figure in Reggie’s daydream of family life.)
There isn’t a template, a pattern that we’re supposed to follow. There’s no one watching us to see if we’re doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.”
“When everything else has gone, love still remains,” Dr. Hunter said. “Totally,” Reggie said. But what good did it do you? None at all.
He wanted a son. He wanted a son so he could teach him all the things he knew, as well as how to learn all the things he didn’t know. He couldn’t teach his daughter anything, she knew more than he did already. And he wanted a son because he was a man. Simple as that. He suddenly recalled the surge of emotion he had felt when he touched Nathan’s head. That was the kind of thing that made a strong man weak for life.
Looking back, he was astonished at the amount of casual brutality in his family (his sister almost as bad as his brother and father), the punches and slaps, the hair tweaking, ear pulling, Chinese burns—a whole vocabulary of violence.
Jackson had never hit a woman or a child, he restricted himself entirely to duffing up his own sex.
He was a man on the road, a man trying to get home. It was about the destination, not the journey. Everyone was trying to get home. Everyone, everywhere, all the time.
It was wrong but she needed flowers.
Louise wondered what poor bugger had dug that out of the heart of darkness a long time ago. Blood on her hands.
People weren’t science, people were a mess.
She was beginning to notice that she was more bloodthirsty than she used to be (and that was saying something).
She seemed to be more fainthearted than she used to be. Bloodthirsty yet fainthearted.
being police was just the obverse of being criminal, after all.
“Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.” He wasn’t police but it wasn’t like marrying out. He understood.
He had broken her in as if she were a high-strung, untamed horse. (But what if he had just broken her?) One step at a time, softly, softly, until she was caught. The taming of the shrew. Shrews were small, harmless furry things, they didn’t deserve their bad reputation.
She became an adept with the locks and the keys, could visit her underwater world at the flick of a mental switch. The problem was that when she had safely locked up all the negative thoughts at the bottom of the sea, there was nothing else left, no positive thoughts at all.
Did he want a baby? She couldn’t ask him in case he said yes. Was he going to seduce her into it, like he’d seduced her into marriage? She already had a child, a child who was wrapped around her heart, and she couldn’t walk on that wild shore again.
