Jesteśmy społecznością, która kocha książki

About a mile from home, she rode through a red light and suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, a police car pulled out of a side street and blocked her path and the window came down and a mean-looking woman with tight brown hair like a thrift-shop bonnet told her that she’d seen what she’d done, that she shouldn’t have done it, and not to do it again, and when Betty said sorry and promised she would never, the woman leaned a little further out of the window, and the man in the seat beside her leaned over to see, and the mean woman said, ‘Because you will die.’ Emphasising ‘will’. ‘You will die,’ she repeated.

After his lunch of burnt lamb, cabbage and corn, he turned out the bathroom light, curled up on his side on the tiled floor and spoke with his wife, who, being dead, listened closely.

For so much of their married life they had spoken in this absurd fashion – face to face, far apart, different towns, countries, continents – until it became as natural to them as any other unnatural thing. Before life-size screens, upon candlelit tables, they would eat the same meals and talk for hours, hardly aware at all that they were not really, not actually, not physically together. When they were done, they would say good day or night, blow a fond kiss, blow out the candle and with a light tap of the finger turn each other off. Leaving one alone in the room, as one had always been, of course.

In her time in the theatre, Betty had grown accustomed to a restless and peripatetic existence. To making and shedding friends at short notice, and in time turning those friends into acquaintances and those acquaintances into strangers; to moving into and out of distant towns and rooms and keeping one’s eye fixed always on the next town, the next room. She’d grown accustomed to living with, around, beneath and inside other people. And she’d learned to let go of those odd, strangely clothed, strangely conflicted, complicated souls once they’d done what they had been created to do and everybody had made good use of them.

One day you realise you will never leave your country ever again. Another day you realise you will never leave this city ever again. Another day it’s the house that holds you fast. Days later, a room. A bed. You will never leave this bed. You turn to find your final position. Now, all there is left to leave is this life. And all that remains of its grand ambitions is a fragment of desire to die in reasonable health.

In the green-walled vestibule he found the portrait of a young girl he had once loved, and though she had lived far away – upon a mountain apparently, in another century – it was to her he would nightly unburden his soul.

Before now Jack had only heard of sex; he had no concept of what it really looked like. He had seen topless women in tabloid newspapers, and the occasional bottomless woman in magazines found near the railway lines. But none of these girls were having sex; they were only showing you the bits they had sex with. But when it came to intercourse, which was what Jack assumed was going on here, he was clueless. His first impression was that it looked far more painful than he’d imagined. His second impression was that it made him want to cry and cry and cry. And so he walked himself away from it, blocking his ears, chewing on his cheeks, sliding his socks across the wood all the way to his room, throwing himself down onto the bed, almost within the bed, there to live inside in the dark with the bugs and the springs.