More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the crook of her arm she cradles a globe, which while she speaks she caresses absently as if it were a fat, spoiled housecat; it almost seems to purr as it revolves langorously under her fingertips.
Lollipop tweaks her friend’s elbow. ‘We should go,’ she murmurs. Her voice is low and soft like cat’s fur.
Three times a week, at 7 a.m., training for one hour. Count yourself lucky, the Senior team trains every morning and Saturdays too. Breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, crawl, back and forth through the blue chemicals;
Seizing an imaginary microphone, Dennis adopts a limp Estuary accent: ‘Masturbating’s changed a lot since I were a lad, Brian. In my day, we masturbated for the sheer love of it. Day and night we did it, all the kids on our estate, masturbating on the old waste ground, masturbating up against the wall of
the house . . . I remember me mam coming out and shouting, “Stop that masturbating and come in for your tea! You’ll never amount to anything if all you think about is masturbating!” Masturbating crazy we were. Your young masturbators today, though, it’s all about the money, it’s all about agents and endorsements. Sometimes I worry that the masturbating’s in danger of being squeezed out altogether.’
the linguistic esprit has been jettisoned in favour of the more direct Cujo; because that’s what his French class is like, being trapped in a small room with a rabid animal. Rail-thin, a head taller than the tallest of the boys, on his best days the priest looks like the end of the world; his presence itself is like smouldering kindling, or knuckles cracking over and over.
and the priest glowers terrifyingly at pupil and hoodlum alike, in his black raiment looking like a single downward stroke of a pen,
The squalling riff from Cream’s ‘Layla’ blasts from the speakers;
Not Cream but Derek and the dominies
DJ Wallace Willis puts on a record sufficiently slow in tempo for the kids, hitherto an amiably bouncing mass, to redistribute themselves into soulfully intertwined couples, kissing each other with varying degrees of accomplishment and Frenchness.
The last of these words are uttered into, and the rest of her philosophy lost inside, Howard’s mouth. Her body twines around him; he pushes her against the blackboard, her pelvis mashing into his, the words WARMING DESERTIFICATION FLOODING EXTINCTION smeared into illegibility by her back.
Ruprecht raises his head from his copybook like a sagacious hamster ‘– that the universe is asymmetrical.’ ‘What? What’s that supposed to mean?’ ‘I mean, what we’re looking at here is a system that went from a high degree of symmetry in the moments immediately after the Big Bang – ten dimensions, all matter and energy conjoined – to the quite low degree of symmetry we have now, with some dimensions curled up, disunited physical forces, what have you. Obviously, it’s still a little bit symmetrical, we have our laws of physics, relativity, rotational symmetry, and so forth. But when you compare
...more
‘Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it for a while, then they bring in violence. That’s the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent.’
Ha, true!
Sixteen hours of repeated disappointment have etched themselves into his face, like an acute strain of the grey necrosis of disillusion the others feel creep across them every second of every day, transforming them into adults.
every time he comes home from work some new small thing is gone, as if he’s being burgled in instalments.
funny line
‘I’ve been thinking about that Robert Frost poem,’ he says. ‘I don’t think it’s about making choices at all.’ ‘What’s it about, so?’ Geoff says. ‘Anal sex,’ Dennis says. ‘Anal sex?’ ‘How’d’you figure, Dennis?’ ‘Well, once you see it, it’s pretty obvious. Just look at what he says. He’s in a wood, right? He sees two roads in front of him. He takes the one less travelled. What else could it be about?’
While often sexually graphic, I enjoy the way the teen banter among the boys.
‘What does Mr Slattery know?’ Dennis scoffs. ‘You think he’s ever taken his wife up the road less travelled?’
Ha
He smiles summatively at the boys; they gaze mutely back at him, in their grey uniforms for all the world like an incorporeal platoon, materialized out of the winter clouds to scour the bare park for someone who has not forgotten them.
. I thought I heard a voice that sounded like Skippy’s.’ ‘Are you talking about the German truck driver?’ ‘Didn’t he sound a lot like Skippy?’ ‘Okay, explain to me why Skippy would be talking in German, about trucks.’ ‘I
