Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.
He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.
But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.
No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods – come and gone with the sun.
You’re next. It’s the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.
The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: ‘To give them no excuse.
It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God’s idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy.
Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.
Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.
I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?
Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.
Still starving themselves, still reading women’s magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can’t be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.
No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.
We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn’t feel this way?
That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.
He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.
I couldn’t afford to be offended.
Every New Year’s Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature.