Barracuda

Homesickness hits hardest in the middle of a crowd in a large, alien city.

In reading he found solitude. In reading he could dispel the blare of the world.

Son, always answer back when you receive an insult. Do it straight away. Even if there’s a chance there was nothing behind it, take back control, answer them back. An insult is an attack. You must counter.

I like being a faggot, mate, I like it a lot and I think being free in our middle age is what we deserve for straights making our childhood and our teenage years so cuntish.

He was going to take in, possess the whole of the world. Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi? Fuck off. He wanted more.

I want two scars, one on each of my shoulder blades.” He shrugged in confusion. “What do you mean?” “Two scars,” I repeated, “for where my wings used to be, where my wings were torn away from me.

I wonder if it is the same for women, whether women always feel this pain when they are fucked? Or is it only in sodomy that pain and pleasure are so linked, so inextricable?

Being working class wasn’t about words, it could only be expressed through the body.

It’s alright,” they say, “Of course, there’s beauty there,” but they hold back; you know they have seen or heard of the ugliness and the insularity there. They have experienced the farawayness of it. I have learned to keep silent, not to berate them for their disregard of the Brits’ role in the colonial tragedy of my country.

I suppose he did – you cannot get further than Australia, can you, lad?

He imagined forgiveness was like flying, that it made you soar. He imagined that it looked like an eagle, a silver bolt in the sky, that it was pure light.

She didn’t call people cunts anymore. Now she said she had problems with the word cunt. She said it was sexist – and if not sexist, they were racist, and if not racist, they were het-er-o-NORM-a-tive, a word he always had to spell out in his head to remember. He could never remember what it meant but he assumed it had to be bad.

It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.

Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.