Siddharth > Books: psycho-thriller‎ (20)

She held him and hugged him hard. She stroked his hair. Her blouse was slippery on his face, her skin was warm, and her pearls dug pleasantly into his forehead. Her breath smelled familiarly of cigarettes and what she’d been drinking and her scent was the one she always had. He heard her heart beat and felt absolutely at home.

She was the first to admit her painting wasn’t very good and although she loved doing it, it’s hard to stick at a thing if you’re aware you’ve an unshakeable mediocrity.

Lewis craved their company so as not to be alone all the time, and then craved being alone just to be away from them.

He understood people’s previously mystifying attachment to the world of work – it got you out of all sorts of things.

It was an odd feeling, a looking-glass feeling, that he had, that all his life he had been on one side of the glass with everybody else on the other and now the glass had broken and the thick, broken pieces were at all of their feet.

Her hair was loose. She stopped in front of him and glanced over her shoulder, like a schoolgirl out of bounds, and breathless with not knowing how to say what she needed to. They looked at each other, and her face, with all its need and hope, went straight to him, as it always had. He felt something like love.

So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

So we went into the Woolworth’s, and immediately I felt much more cheerful. Even now, I like places like that: a large store with lots of aisles displaying bright plastic toys, greeting cards, loads of cosmetics, maybe even a photo booth. Today, if I’m in a town and find myself with some time to kill, I’ll stroll into somewhere just like that, where you can hang around and enjoy yourself, not buying a thing, and the assistants don’t mind at all.

I was still feeling a pang of regret that we’d found it so quickly, and it was only later, when we were back at the Cottages and I was alone in my room, that I really appreciated having the tape – and that song – back again. Even then, it was mainly a nostalgia thing, and today, if I happen to get the tape out and look at it, it brings back memories of that afternoon in Norfolk every bit as much as it does our Hailsham days.

On that journey home, with the darkness setting in over those long empty roads, it felt like the three of us were close again and I didn’t want anything to come along and break that mood.

But by the time people became concerned about … about students, by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. ... There was no going back.

There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness. People
sometimes say they might die of boredom, that they’re dying for a cup of tea,
but for me, dying of loneliness is not hyperbole. When I feel like that, my
head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human
contact – I truly feel that I might tumble to the ground and pass away if
someone doesn’t hold me, touch me. I don’t mean a lover – this recent madness
aside, I had long since given up on any notion that another person might love
me that way – but simply as a human being.

The strange thing – something I’d never expected – was that it actually made
you feel better when someone put their arm around you, held you close. Why? Was
it some mammalian thing, this need for human contact? He was warm and solid. I
could smell his deodorant, and the detergent he used to wash his clothes – over
both scents there lay a faint patina of cigarettes. A Raymond smell. I leaned
in closer.

That was Erika's experience of fatherhood: the solid, silent weight of someone else's dad's hand on her shoulder. That was the sort of father Oliver would be.

The sunlight shone on the wall behind him and made his eyes look very blue in the shadowiness of his face. He looked simultaneously very young and very old, as if all the past and future versions of himself were overlaid on his face.

The third man - Bert Voizey - never felt comfortable in this kind of fancy house. Like one of his own ferrets, he had a natural instinct for creeping about in darker corners. He was not at ease with loud, confident people who stared you straihgt in the eye when they talked to you.

As an afterthought, he drew himself in the picture too, off to the side. He’d let Robin down, he felt. Usually the maid wasn’t around on Sundays, but that day, she was. If he hadn’t let her chase him off, earlier in the afternoon, then Robin might still be alive.

No, it wasn’t his imagination: the girl had vanished off the face of the earth in the weeks after Gum’s accident, when he’d driven the town looking for her. But now: think of her, mention her and there she was, glowing at a distance with that black Chinese haircut and those spiteful eyes.

“What’s your problem, Harriet?” It grieved Hely that she never did what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk through the narrow path in the tall grass with her, holding hands and smoking cigarettes like grown people, their bare legs all scratched and muddy. Fine rain and a fine white froth blown up around the edge of the reeds.

It was something like a small black goblin—scarcely three feet tall, with orange beak and big orange feet, and a strangely drenched look. As the car went by, it turned in a smooth tracking motion and opened its black wings like a bat . . . and Danny had the uncanny sensation that he’d met it before, this creature, part blackbird, part dwarf, part devilish child; that somehow (despite the improbability of such a thing) he remembered it from somewhere.

It was pathetic now, to think back on how he’d looked forward to his release from jail, counting the days until he got to go home, because the thing he hadn’t understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism.

There was no point in hanging around upstairs and calling attention to himself. He would go back upstairs once that painted-up whore went off shift.

A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

She noticed that she was putting on a well-bred private schoolgirl sort of voice and tried to stop it. She wasn't a private schoolgirl. She'd married up

Madeline saw Jane's body react instantly, instinctively, like the sudden rear of a snake or pounce of an animal. Her back straightened. Her chin lifted. "Ziggy doesn't lie"

Just come back home, Abigail, come back home and stop this. He left us. He left you. You were my reward. Missing out on you was his punishment. How could you choose him?

What are you thinking, Amy? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

What are you thinking, Amy? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

What's the point of being together, if you are not the happiest?

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum, to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy