Ordinary People

It wasn’t you, you know,’ Michael said in the end. ‘That wasn’t the reason. You were just a device in the machine of our breaking, and we needed to break. It’s not so bad, when it finally happens. You think the world is going to collapse around you but it doesn’t. You can see yourself clearly again. You realise that the fear was the worst thing.

Where is the fault? Is it believing that the people you love are immortal? Untouchable? No, everyone believes that. Only no one know it's what they believe- until it happens. Then comes the rage, the banging about the walls, crying what if, what if. Everyone is always so damned surprised, that is the horror of it.

It’s not so bad, when it finally happens. You think the world is going to collapse around you but it doesn’t. You can see yourself clearly again. You realise that the fear was the worst thing.

his life required a dramatic change, a splintering, some kind of scandal or shock or tremor, when he most wanted to flee, to rip off his suit and run screaming from the building, and go – where?

The greatest challenge of life is to not die before we die

Before the children,’ Alice said, nodding her head slowly. ‘Children change everything. Family change everything. You must cross the river, to the other side of yourself. After that you find it.

This is where you come when you are lost, when you feel that you are never going to find the place. You go to the first place, the first country, to her net curtains and her singular food, to her safe and open door. You lie down. You eat. You listen to her. And you know that this house will not fall down. This house is sturdy and is made of bricks, and the wolf will not come and blow it down.

Jump, by Kris Kross, on whether there is jumping during the chorus and for how long.

The voice took Damian right back to a time when Joyce, he and Laurence were sitting at the table playing blackjack. It was all crisp edges and clusters of colours in his head, Joyce’s purple cardigan, the gold buttons, the flowers on the table, the orange curtain. The vividness, the immediacy of the image, brought tears to his eyes.

There was so much to think about and so much to do with all this activity and responsibility that he hardly had time to really consider how he missed London, the hum of it, the Brixton roar and the beloved river, the West Indian take aways, the glittering of the tower blocks at night, the mobile phone shacks, the Africans in Peckham, the common proximity of plantain, the stern beauty of church women on Sunday mornings, the West End, the art in the air, the music in the air, the sense of possibility. He missed the tube, the telephone boxes. He even missed, deep down, the wicked parking inspectors and the heartless bus drivers who flew past queues of freezing pedestrians out of spite. He missed riding from Loughborough to Surrey Quays on his bike with the plane trees whizzing by, the sight of some long-weaved woman walking along in tight jeans and a studded belt and look-at-me boots and maybe a little boy holding her hand. The skylines, the alleyways, and yes, the sirens and helicopters and the hit of life, all these things he knew so well. And the fact, most of all, that he belonged there in a way that he would never, could never, belong in Dorking. He was outside, displaced. He was off the A-Z. He felt, in a very fundamental way, that he was living outside of his life, outside of himself. And the problem was, if indeed it was a problem – how could you call something like this a problem when there were bills to pay and children to feed and a house to maintain? – the problem was that he did not know what to do about it, how to get rid of this feeling, how to get to a place where he felt that he was in the right place. And this not being such a serious problem, not really a problem at all, he had suppressed it and accepted things as they were.

Their talking was like a river, always flowing, delirious with movement. It was oblivious to their physical separation and continued within, so that their coming back together was merely an increase in volume.