Lanny

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?

And she laughed, and said she understood, and then off she drifted in that nice way she has. Responsive to the light, I would call it. The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be. Which explains Lanny.

We are but pitiful narrative creatures... obsessing over the agony of not knowing. Sisyphus, Atlas, Echo, all those poor souls, now us. It is the oldest story of them all; never-ending pain.

I’m a million cameras, even when I’m sleeping, clicking, clicking, every second something is growing and changing. We are little arrogant flashes in a grand magnificent scheme.

What or who is supposed to manage and regulate Lanny and his gifts," he asks. "Oh fuck, it's us. Who can have children and not go completely mad?

Ah, Lanny, my friend, look at these blank pages. Don't you feel like God at the start of the ages? You could do anything,

Crouched across from her, Toothwort has darkened, his foliate head has ripened into moulde, fungus and brown ripples,sweaty, heavy with rot and enzymes. He smells like natural truth, like sex and death.

None of us actually feel anything for anybody. It's all pretend.

This is what commuting is. Small pleasures coaxed from playing the routine like a game. Little tricks of the part-time countryman. It might be soul-destroying. I might be a bit pitiful. I don’t know.

Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter.

He thinks our souls split off and wander around for a bit, seeing things properly. He thinks we see for the first time how things really work, how close we are to plants, how everything is connected, and we get it, finally, but only for a second. We see shapes and patterns and it’s incredibly beautiful like the best art ever, with maths and science and music and feelings all at once, the whole of everything. And then we just dissolve and become air.

There is no such thing as trust. It's a pernicious lie

The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be.

This tragedy will be the story of your whole life, but it’s your life and you can sleep forever and ever if needs be.

It’s for the whole village and anyone who finds it. It’s to make them fall in love with everything. It’s my biggest project so far.

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or hope?

I have a drawing by Lanny stuck above my desk. It's me in a cape, flying above a skyline and it says, 'Where does Dad go every day? Nobody knows.

Lanny would be thrilled to be compared to a March hare, leaping in the long grass, boxing his own reflection. A bringer of strange dreams, skipping about the wide open village.

But darling we’ve talked about this so often, you cannot fix the way the world is broken all on your own.

False things, endings. Sustenance for fools and never what they claim to be.

You could give her a hug but she’d bite your arm off.

I can usually see a way to understand terrible things; Satanic worship, decaffeinated coffee, cosmetic surgery, but Renoir’s portrait of Madame de Bonnières? No. It cannot be understood or forgiven. And framed in gold plastic and spot-lit from above? No offence intended, Charlotte, there is not a chamber of hell hot enough for a woman of your taste.

Memory swings like a hard dirt rudder then slips up with a boom and a crack and catches the wind.

Wat is geduldiger volgens jou, een idee of hoop?

Then Dead Papa Toothwort leaves his spot and wanders off...tingling with thoughts of how one thing leads to another again and again, time and again, with no such thing as an ending.

I am comfortable in my bed, in this house, in the countryside.

She’s convinced of a great and unstoppable badness at work in the world. She’s not wrong.

False things, endings. Sutenance for fools and never what they claim to be.