While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it.
She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men’s work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we’re out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends.
You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say.
Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.
She wants to jig and amble, she wants to lisp, she wants to suck the last slurp of essence out of his almost-voided cranium. Avaunt, wanton!
There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood.
Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth, oh to die of laughter.
Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.
She sees where she is, she’s here, by herself, she’s stranded in the future. She doesn’t know how to get back.
Arms up in the air now; let’s pretend we’re trees.
Everyone believed him of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone’s head was going to roll it wouldn’t be hers.
Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought – kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges – that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she’d grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she’d been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.
I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.
You can’t lead if no one will follow.
All that time, blowing away in the summer breeze. It was daisies for love though, and we did that too.
And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.
Life is not about hair... hair is about life. It is the flame of the body’s candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts away.
How could a person be caught that way, in an instant, by a glance, the lift of an eyebrow, the curve of an arm? But he was.
We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.
For Adam was first formed, then Eve. ‘And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived in the transgression.