A Slow Fire Burning

Everything is material. And comedy equals tragedy plus time. Isn’t that how it goes?

Angela was a vandal when it came to books: a cracker of spines, a dog-earer of pages, a scribbler in margins.

That we were all so happy. It seems unimaginable. All that happiness, wrecked.

Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart? In fiction, that would never stand.

Miriam had lost the talent for friendship when she was young, and once gone, it was a difficult thing to recover. Like loneliness, the absence of friendship was self-perpetuating: the harder you tried to make people like you, the less likely they were to do so; most people recognized right away that something was off, and they shied away.

He captured movement, he registered nuance, he was empathetic on the page in a way he never seemed to achieve in real life.

She glimpsed, opening up in front of her, the possibility of a quite different life from the one she currently led, a far richer (in the cultural sense), more peopled life.

Nobody felt eighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel, wasn’t it? You knew who you were then. You weren’t still flighty or unsure, but you had not yet had time to harden, to become unyielding.

She needed to tell him that she’d looked at his latest piece of writing too, that she didn’t like it, all the to-ing and fro-ing, all that jumping around in the timeline. Like the last one, the awful crime thing. Just start at the beginning, for God’s sake.

Irene had read in a newspaper article that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why—there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased. Only, once you’d fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you? It was too late by then.

When they’re born,” she said, her hand resting on the door handle, “you hold them, and you imagine a glorious, golden future. Not money or success or fame or anything like that, but happiness. Such happiness! You’d see the world burn if only it meant they would be happy.

The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life would probably see you that way, the number of new people who could appreciate you as that person, that inside person, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.

fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting in a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be. On dead people.

So uneventful, she remembered almost nothing of it except for an oddly sepia-toned mental image of a terraced house on a narrow street, the sensation of dry, scratchy lawn beneath her feet in summer. Her memory seemed only to bloom into full color from around the age of nine,

There, in her imagination, was everything Irene feared—seeing herself reduced to a cliché of old age, a person without agency, without hope or future or intention, sitting by herself in a comfortable chair with a blanket over her knees, in the waiting room of death.

You do far more exercise when you have a dog. It gets you out of the house, you know it does;

who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing

Carla was the sort of woman who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

If you showed up to a work do with Ben, they’d give you a medal for father of the year. If I do it, they’ll say she can’t cope, her mind’s not on the job, there’s no way she can handle any more than she already does.