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- "Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important." (E.M. Forster)
- He lay in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed on either side like some fallen angel.
- It made sense that Archie should die on this nasty urban street where he had ended up, living along at the age of forty-seven, in a one-bedroom flat above a deserted chip shop.
- He wasn't the type to make elaborate plans -- suicide notes and funeral instructions -- he wasn't the type for anything fancy. All he asked for was a bit of silence, a bit of shush so he could concentrate. He wanted it to be perfectly quiet and still, like the inside of an empty confessional or the moment in the brain between thought and speech.)
- ...he watched them watch the slow and steady draining of blood from the dead things -- chickens, cows, sheep -- hanging on their hooks like coats around the shop.
- The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit. Mo was the only man in the community who truly understood. (5)
- Archie dragged his head off the steering wheel. And in the moment between focusing on the sweaty bulk of a brown-skinned Elvis and realizing that life was still his, he had kind of an epiphany. It occurred to him that, for the first time since his birth, Life had said Yes to Archie Jones. Not simply and "OK" or "You-might-as-well-carry-on-since-you've-started," but a resounding affirmative. Life wanted Archie. She had jealously grabbed him from the jaws of death, back to her bosom. (6)
- Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and finding they don't fit. For the sake of appearances, he put up with them. And then, all of a sudden and after thirty years, the shoes picked themselves up and walked out of the house.
- She was not to know that women never stayed as daylight in Archie's life; that somewhere in him he didn't like them, he didn't trust them, and he was able to love them only if they wore haloes. No one told Archie that lurking in the Diagilo family tree were two hysteric aunts, an uncle who talked to eggplants, and a cousin who wore his clothes back to front. (7)
- ...until he was overcome by the sensation that Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk on into the blackness. (9)
- Solemnly he flipped a coin (heads, life, tails, death) and felt nothing in particular when he found himself staring at the dancing lion. (9)
- At nights he looked out through the windshield into the monstropolous sky and had the old realization of his universal proportions, feeling what it was to be tiny and rootless. He thought about the dent he might make on the world if he disappeared, and it seemed negligible, too small to calculate. He squandered spare minutes wondering whether "Hoover" had become a generic term for vacuum cleaners or whether it was, as others have argued, just a brand name. And all the time the Hoover tube lay like a great flaccid cock on his back seat, mocking his quiet fear, laughing at his pigeon-steps as he approached the executioner, sneering at his impotent decision. (10)
- "And you? You have picked up the wrong life in the cloakroom and you must return it." (11)
- ...he remembered him affectionately as an enormous man with strawberry-blond hair, orange freckles, and misaligned nostrils, who dressed like an international playboy and seemed too large for his bike. (14)
- Daria was his one. Terribly skinny, ribs like lobster traps and no chest to speak of, but she was a lovely sort: kind; soft with her kisses and with double-jointed wrists she liked to show off in a pair of long silk gloves--set you back four clothing coupons at least. (14)
- ...and realized he regretted not coming hither. If there was any chance of ever seeing a look like that again, then he wanted the second chance, he wanted the extra time. Not just this second, but the next and the next -- all the time in the world. (15)
- Later that morning, Archie did an ecstatic eight circuits of Swiss Cottage traffic circle in his car, his head stuck out the window, a stream of air hitting the teeth at back of his mouth like a windsock. (15)
- Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. In this manner, a new Archie is about to emerge. We have caught him on the hop. For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. He is in a maybe this, maybe that kind of mood. When he approaches a fork in the road, he slows down, checks his undistinguished face in the rearview mirror, and quite indiscriminately chooses a route he's never taken before. (15)
- As Merlin was later to reflect when describing the incident, at any time of the day corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. (16)
- ...(he had all this new time on his hands, masses and masses of it, dribbling through his fingers)... (17)
- ...he headed for the picnic table, where something the shape and color of Jack Daniel's had sprung up like a mirage in a desert of empty wine bottles. (17)
- In return, they told him he was in possession of a unique soul for a man of his age. Everybody agreed some intensely positive karmic energy was circulating in and around Archie, the kind of thing strong enough to prompt a butcher to roll down a car window at the critical moment. (18)
- ...but he wondered whether there wasn't some higher pattern to it. Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. (19)
- The classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hair braided in a horseshoe that pointed up when she felt lucky, down when she didn't. At this moment it was up. It is hard to know whether that was significant. (19)
- Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelled musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favorite clothes. Though she was disorganized physically -- legs and arms speaking a slightly different dialect from her central nervous system -- even her gangly demeanor seemed to Archie exceptionally elegant. She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not (as most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to old it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down. (20)
- "Go home, get some rest. Marnin' de the world new, every time. Man... dis life no easy!" (21) (Clara's 1st advice to Archie)
- He was a mess of unfortunate physical characteristics. He was very thin and very tall, redheaded, flat-footed, and freckled to such an extent that his skin was rarer than his freckles. (23)
- To Ryan's way of thinking, a Vespa was not merely a mode of transport but an ideology, family, friend, and lover all rolled into one paragon of late-forties engineering. (24)
- Clara Bowdwen, aged seventeen, was gangly, bucktoothed, a Jehovah's Witness, and saw in Ryan a kindred spirit. A typical teenage female panopticon, she knew everything there was to know about Ryan Topps long before they ever spoke. (24)
- So Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was black as yer boot. Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dots enthusiast's wet dream. Clara could circumnavigate an apple with her front teeth before her tongue got anywhere near it. Not even the Catholics could forgive them for it. (25)
- The Bowden living room sat just below street level, and had bars on its window, so all views were partial. Generally, she would see feet, wheels, car exhausts, swinging umbrellas. Such slight glimpses were often telling: a lively imagination could squeeze much pathos out of a frayed lace, a darned sock, a low-swinging bag that had seen better days. But nothing affected her more deeply than gazing after the disappearing tailpipe of Ryan's scooter. Lacking any name for the furtive rumblings that appeared in her lower abdomen on these occasions, Clara called it the spirit of the Lord. She felt that somehow she was going to save the heathen Ryan Topps. Clara meant to gather this boy close to her breast, keep him safe... (25)
- "Blessed are the pure in heart for they alone shall see God." Matthew 5:8. (26)
- ...at the end of it all, Darcus slumped deeper into the recesses of his chair, looked mournfully at the television with which he had had such an understanding, compassionate relationship -- so uncomplicated, so much innocent affection -- and a tear squeezed its way out of its duct and settled in a crag underneath his eye. Then he said just one word: Hmph. (26)
- ...didn't get too close, scared they might catch religion like an infection. (29)
- At No. 75 she spent an hour with a fourteen-year-old physics whizz called Colin who wanted to intellectually disprove the existence of God while looking up her skirt. (29)
- Clara felt she was closing in on herself, like a telescope. It was only moments, surely, before she disappeared entirely. (30)
- Was it everything that Clara, in all her sweaty adolescent invention, had imagined? (31)
- She imagined herself holding the bleeding Ryan in her arms, hearing him finally declare his undying love; she saw herself as Mod Widow, wearing black turtlenecks for a year and demanding "Waterloo Sunset" be played at his funeral. Clara's inexplicable dedication to Ryan Topps knew no bounds. It transcended his bad looks, tedious personality, and unsightly personal habits. Essentially, it transcended Ryan, for whatever Hortense claimed, Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. (31)
- Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose. (33)
- She became more and more reluctant to leave the impress of her knees in the red cushions in the Kingdom Hall. She would not wear sashes, carry banners, or give out leaflets. She would not tell anyone about missing steps. She discovered dope, forgot the staircase, and began taking the elevator. (33)
- It was the voice Hortense put on when she had company -- an overcompensation of all the consonants -- the voice she used for pastors and white women. (33)
- Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair than when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee's mother? (34)
- Of course, like the mother of a drug addict or the neighbor of a serial killer, Clara was the last to know. (34)
- The principles of Christianity and Sod's Law (also known as Murphy's Law) are the same: Everything happens to me for me. (37)
- Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt -- something is gained but something is lost.
- Yes a residue, left over from the evaporation of Clara's faith, remained. She still wished for a savior. She still wished for a man to whisk her away, to choose her above others so that she might walk in white with Him: for she was worthy. Revelation 3:4. (38)
- Clara saw Archie through the gray-green eyes of loss: her world had just disappeared, the faith she lived by had receded like a low tide, and Archie, quite by accident, had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth. (38)
- It was a lottery driving along like that, looking out, not knowing whether one was about to settle down for life among the trees or among the shit. (40)
- And whatever Corinthians might say, love is not such a hard thing to forfeit, not if you've never really felt it. (40)
- And if you are saddled with a man as average as this, Clara felt, he should at least be utterly devoted to you -- to your beauty, to your youth -- that's the least he could do to make up for things. But not Archie. One month into their marriage and he already had that funny glazed look men have when they are looking through you. (41)
- ...silently watching the way her husband's brow furrowed and shortened like an accordion, the way his stomach hung pregnant over his belt, the whiteness of his skin, the blueness of his veins... (41)
- Clara remembered slipping off the petite brown heels she was wearing and placing her bare feet on the chilly floor, making sure to keep them firmly planted either side of a dark crack in the tile, a balancing act upon which she had randomly staked her future happiness.
- Clara, of course, was all cat. She wore a long brown woollen Jeff Banks dress and a perfect set of false teeth; the dress was backless, the teeth were white, and the overall effects was feline; a panther in evening dress; where the wool stopped and Clara's skin started was not clear to the naked eye. And like a cat she responded to the dusty sunbeam that was coursing through a high window onto the waiting couples. She warmed her bare back in it, she almost seemed to unfurl. Even the registrar, who had seen it all -- horsy women marrying weaselly men, elephantine men marrying owlish women -- raised an eyebrow at this most unnatural of unions as they approached his desk. Cat and dog. (42)
- What other memories of that day could make it unique and lift it out of the other 364 that made up 1975? Clara remembered a young black man stood atop an apple crate, sweating in a black suit, who began pleading to his brothers and sisters; an old bag lady retrieving a carnation from the bin to put in her hair. But then it was all over: the plastic-wrapped sandwiches Clara had made had been forgotten and sat suffering at the bottom of a bag, the sky had clouded over, and when they walked up the hill to the King Ludd Pub, past the jeering Fleet Street lads with their Saturday pints, it was discovered that Archie had been given a parking ticket.
- ...said Ardashir, his dead-fish lips stretching into a stringy smile.
- ...he had instead the urge, the need, to speak to every man, and, like the Ancient Mariner, explain constantly, constantly wanting to reassert something, anything. Wasn't that important?
- "We are never out of sight of the Creator." (53)
- (It was an oddity about Alsana. She was small but her feet were enormous. You felt instinctively when looking at her that she had more growing up to do.))
- From every minority she disliked, Alsana liked to single out one specimen for spiritual forgiveness. From Whitechapel, there had been many such redeemed characters. Mr. Van, the Chinese chiropodist, Mr. Segal, a Jewish carpenter, Rosie, a Dominican woman who continuously popped round, much to Alsana's grievance and delight, in an attempt to convert her into a Seventh-Day Adventist -- all these lucky individuals were given Alsana's golden reprieve and magically extrapolated from their skins like Beijing tigers. (55)
- "Don't you hippies eat sweets or something?" [-] Noel's hair was ever so slightly longer than everyone else's, and he had once bought an incense stick to burn in the coffee room. It was a small office, there was little to talk about, so these two things made Noel second only to Janis Joplin, just as Archie was the white Jesse Owens because he came 13th in the Olympics 27 years ago, Gary from Accounts had a French grandmother and blew cigarette smoke out of his nose so he was Maurice Chevalier, and Elmott, Archie's fellow paper-folder, was Einstein because he could manage two thirds of The Times crossword. (58)
- Maureen had good legs for a woman her age -- legs like sausages tightly packed in their skins. (58)
- Maureen laughed for a long time, her trademark laugh at MorganHero: shrill and loud, but with her mouth only slightly open, for Maureen had a morbid dread of laughter lines. (59)
- ...said Kelvin Hero, revealing a double row of pearly whites that owed more to expensive dentistry than to regular brushing. (60)
- Kelvin smiled: a big gash across his face that came and went with the sudden violence of a fat man marching through swing doors. (60)
- "Too old to be so rude and too young to know any better." (64)
- "Not in my experience, Mrs. Iqbal, no," says Sol Jozefowicz, in the collected manner in which he said everything. (67)
- "Oh, Alsi," Neena is saying, weaving in and out of Alsana's words like tapestry; feeling bad. (68)
- "But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the truth. I have to worry about the truth that can be lived with. And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the stuff from the streams. My Niece-of-Shame believes in the talking cure, eh?" says Alsana, with something of a grin. "Talk, talk, talk, and it will be better. But the past is made of more than words, dearie. We married old men, you see? These bumps" -- Alsana pats them both -- "they will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past. No talking will change this. Their roots will always be tangled. And roots get dug up. Just look in my garden -- birds at the coriander every bloody day..." (68)
- The old American question: what do you want -- blood? (71)
- Back to Samad, two years older and the warm color of baked bread. (71)
- Young Thomas had resigned himself to his fate and was engaged in a concerted and prolonged effort (four years now) to get his name on the ever-extending list of Dickinson-Smiths carved on a long slab of death-stone in the village of Little Marlow, to be buried on top of them all in the family's sardine-can tomb that proudly dominated the historic churchyard. (76)
- ...as for Will Johnson, he did not speak during the day but whimpered as he slept, and his face spoke eloquently of more miseries than anyone dared inquire into. (77)
- And it was a funny kind of struggle between knowledge and practical ability... (79)
- It was during this time that Archie learned the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life. (79)
- ...pointed to a large derelict house that sat like a fat brooding hen on the horizon. (81)
- ...and looking in the back bedrooms of pretty women's houses, but after a time this too was abandoned and they sat instead smoking cheap cigars outside the tank, enjoying the lingering crimson sunsets and chatting about their previous incarnations as newspaper boy (Archie) and biology student (Samad). They knocked around ideas that Archie did not entirely understand, and Samad offered secrets into the cool night that he had never spoken out loud. Long, comfortable silences passed between them like those between women who have known each other for years. They looked out on to stars that lit up known country, but neither man clung particularly to home. In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue. (82)
- "...if you ever hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, "hold your judgment. If you are told 'they are all this' or 'they do this' or 'their opinions are these,' withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call 'India' goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight." (83)
- Samad had taken an interest too (due to loneliness, he told himself; due to melancholy) in the powdered morphine to be found in stray storage cabinets throughout the building; hidden eggs on an addictive Easter trail. Whenever Archie went to piss or to try the radio once more, Samad roved up and down his little church, looting cabinet after cabinet, like a sinner moving from confessional to confessional. Then, having found his little bottle of sin, he would take the opportunity to rub a little onto his gums or smoke a little in his pipe, and then lie back on the cool terra-cotta floor, looking up into the exquisite curve of the church dome. It was covered in words, this church. Words left 300 years earlier by dissenters, unwilling to pay a burial tax during a cholera epidemic, locked in the church by a corrupt landlord and left to die in there -- but not before they covered every wall with letters to family, poems, statements of eternal disobedience. Samad liked the story well enough when he first heard it, but it only truly struck him when the morphine hit. Then every nerve in his body would be alive, and the information, all the information contained in the universe, all the information on walls, would pop its cork and flow through him like electricity through a ground wire. Then his head would open out like a deckchair. And he would sit in it a while and watch his world go by. Tonight, after just more than enough, Samad felt particularly lucid. Like his tongue was buttered, and like the world was a polished marble egg. And he felt a kinship with the dead dissenters, they were Pande's brothers -- every rebel, it seemed to Samad tonight, was his brother -- he wished he could speak with them about the mark they made on the world. Had it been enough? When death came, was it really enough? Were they satisfied with the thousand words they left behind?
- "I can't see the difference, frankly," said Archie. "When you're dead, you're dead." [-] "Oh no, Archibald, no," whispered Samad, melancholic. "You don't believe that. You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence, Archibald," he said, gesturing to the church walls... "Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes." (86)
- ...a big, open face, a squint in the left eye, and a head of sandy hair that struck off in several directions. He was altogether a rather jolly apparition on a bright morning, and when he spoke it was in a fluent, American-accented English that lapped at your ears like surf. (89)
- ...and with a cigarette hanging casually off his lower lip like a sophisticated sentence.
- ...munching on a chicken bone philosophically. (92)
- Samad was dimly aware that he looked out of sorts. Earlier that evening he had put a tiny line of the white stuff on the insides of his eyelids. The morphine had sharpened his mind to a knife edge and cut it open. It had been a luscious, eloquent high while it lasted, but then the thoughts thus released had been left to wallow in a pool of alcohol and had landed Samad in a malevolent trough. He saw his reflection this evening, and it was ugly. He saw where he was -- at the farewell party for the end of Europe -- and he longed for the East. He looked down at his useless hand with its five useless appendages; at his skin, burned to a chocolate-brown by the sun; he saw into his brain, made stupid by stupid conversation and the dull stimuli of death, and longed for the man he once was: erudite, handsome, light-skinned Samad Miah...
- Samad stepped forward. He had had a gun in his mouth and was emboldened by it. He had eaten an absurd amount of morphine, fallen through the hole morphine creates, and survived. You are never stronger, thought Samad as he approached the doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.
- "What I have realized, is that the generations," Samad continued as they sped through miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, "they speak to each other, Jones. It's not a line, life is not a line -- this is not palm-reading -- it's a circle, and they speak to us. That is why you cannot READ fate; you must EXPERIENCE it." Samad could feel the morphine bringing the information to him again -- all the information in the universe and all the information on walls -- in one fantastic revelation.
- "What are you going to tell your children when they ask who you are, what you are? Will you know? Will you ever know?" (101)
- He slapped dead an insect that had been winding its way round his wrist, looking for enough flesh to bite. Lifting his head, he saw in front of him that Archie was returning: bleeding and limping badly, made visible, then invisible, illuminated, obscured, as he wound in and out of the headlights. He looked his tender age, the lamps making his blond hair translucent, his moon-shaped face lit up like a big baby, entering life head first. (102)
- "Well, the Chalfens were behind you -- they're such nice people -- intellectuals," she whispered, as if it were some exotic disease of the tropics.
- A strange child with a cold intellect.
- I. TO THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE.
- There are 9 acts which invalidate fast: (i) eating and drinking; (ii) sexual intercourse; (iii) masturbation (istimna), which means self-abuse, resulting in ejaculation; (iv) ascribing false things to Almighty Allah, or his Prophet, or to the successors of the Holy Prophet; (v) swallowing thick dust; (vi) immersing one's complete head in water; (vii) remaining in Janabat or Haidh or Nifas till the Adhan for Fajr prayers; (viii) enema with liquids; (ix) vomiting
- "But which is the correct belief? Is it halal or haraam? There are some who say..." Samad had begun sheepishly, "To the pure all things are pure. If one is truthful and firm in oneself, it can harm nobody else, not offend..."
- There is a hadith of the Prophet Muhhamad -- peace be upon Him! -- it is as follows: "O Allah, I seek refuge in you from the evil of my hearing, of my sight, of my tongue, of my heart, and of my private parts."
- "...my advice to you is to stay away from your right hand."
- ..secretly, silently; for he was, believe it or not, tortured by it, by this furtive yanking and squeezing and spilling, by the fear that he was not pure, that his acts were not pure, that he would never be pure, and always his God seemed to be sending him small signs, small warnings, small curses... until 1980 brought crisis-point and Samad heard Allah roaring in his ear like the waves in a conch-shell and it seemed time to make a deal.
- ...he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man. (117)
- ...the longest, stickiest, smelliest, guiltiest 56 days of Samad's life. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the color of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her hand on the tube, tasting her smile while innocently walking the streets on his way to work; and this in turn led to a knowledge of every public convenience in London, led to the kind of masturbation that even a 15-year-old boy living in the Shetlands might find excessive. (117)
- He meant somehow to purge himself of the sights and smells of Poppy Burt-Jones, of the sin of istimna... (117)
- "My whole body is mutinous, nothing will do what I tell it. Never before have I been subjected to such physical indignities." (120)
- "It is not guilt. It is fear." (120)
- Samad closed his eyes and forced his eyeballs to roll up as far as possible in his head, in the hope that this brain might impact upon them, a self-blinding, if he could achieve it, on a par with that other victim of Western corruption, Oedipus. Think: I want another woman. Think: I've killed my son. I swear. I eat bacon. I regularly slap the salami. I drink Guinness. My best friend is a kaffir nonbeliever. I tell myself if I rub up and down without using hands it does not count. But oh it does count. It all counts on the great counting board of He who counts. What will happen come Mahshar? How will I absolve myself when the Last Judgment comes? (124)
- ...surely a man has reached his lowest when he is jealous of the child at a woman's breast, when he is jealous of the young, of the future... (128)
- ...but why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was? He was thinking like a Christian again; he was saying 'Can't say fairer than that' to the Creator. (129)
- ...trying to convey the jerky head and hand movements of bharata natyam, the form of dance Alsana had once enjoyed before sadness weighed her heart, and babies tied down her hands and feet. (130)
- Poppy Burt-Jones leaned forward in her chair. "I don't know... To me, it's just like this incredible act of self-control. We just don't have that in the West -- that sense of sacrifice -- I just have so much admiration for the sense your people have of abstinence, of self-restraint." (133)
- Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable. Like Garibaldi biscuits. (136)
- "If you ask me," said one disgruntled old age pensioner to another, "they should all go back to their own..." [-] But this, the oldest sentence in the world, found itself stifled by the ringing of bells and the stamping of feet, until it retreated under the seats with the chewing gum." (137)
- Poppy smiled; a terrific smile that accentuated every natural beauty of that face and had in it, Samad thought, something better than this, something with no shame in it, something better and purer than what they were doing. (140)
- Magid gave Irie an et tu, Brute type of pleading look, in the full knowledge that it was useless. There is no honesty among almost-ten-year-olds. (141)
- As old as they had imagined, but far taller and cleaner, he opened the door only slightly, keeping his hand, with its mountain range of blue veins, upon the knob, while his head curled around the frame. To Irie he was reminiscent of some genteel elderly eagle: tufts of featherlike hair was protruded from his ears, shirt cuffs, and neck, with one white spray falling over his forehead, his fingers lay in a permanent tight spasm like talons, and he was well dressed, as one might expect of an elderly English bird in Wonderland -- a suede waistcoat and a tweed jacket, and a watch on a gold chain. (141)
- "One sometimes forgets the significance of one's teeth. We're not like the lower animals -- teeth replaced regularly and all that -- we're of the mammals, you see. And mammals only get two chances, with teeth. More sugar?" (144)
- Mr. Hamilton laughed softly to himself, turned his head, and silently admired the roaming branches of a cherry tree that dominated one whole corner of his garden. After a long pause he turned back and tears were visible in his eyes again -- fast, sharp tears as if he had been slapped in the face. (144-45)
- "Fibs will rot your teeth." (145)
- "And when your teeth rot," continued Mr. Hamilton, smiling at the ceiling, "aah, there's no return. They won't look at you like they used to. The pretty ones won't give you a second glance, not for love or money. But while you're still young, the important matter is the third molars. They are more commonly referred to as the wisdom teeth, I believe. You simply must deal with the third molars before anything else. That was my downfall. [...] The problem with the third molars is one is never sure whether one's mouth will be large enough to accommodate them. They are the only part of the body that a man must grow into. He must be a big enough man for these teeth, do you see? Because if not -- oh dear me, they grow crooked or any which way, or refuse to grow at all. They stay locked up there with the bone -- an impaction, I believe, is the term -- and terrible, terrible infection ensues. Have them out early[...] You simply must. You can't fight against it. I wish I had. I wish I'd given up early and hedged my bets, as it were. Because they're you're father's teeth, you see, wisdom teeth are passed down by the father, I'm certain of it. So you must be big enough for them. God knows, I wasn't big enough for mine... Have them out and brush 3 times a day, if my advice means anything." (145)
- And they knew the city breeds the Man. (145)
- ...they knew Mr. Toupee, who has no eyebrows and wears a toupee not on his head but on a string around his neck. But these people announced their madness -- they were better, less scary than Mr. J.P. Hamilton -- they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. (146)
- In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalk-eyed, blue-lipped, or eyebrow-less. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narration from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you're going (usually Baker Street -- the great majority of modern-day seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they're out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what are we looking at. What the fuck are we looking at. As a kind of preeemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question "What are you looking at?" and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer -- "Nothing" -- might be avoided. But as the prey evolves (and we are prey to the Mad who are pursuing us, desperate to impart their own brand of truth to the hapless commuter) so does the hunter, and the true professionals begin to tire of that old catchphrase "What are you looking at?" and move into more exotic territory. (146)
- (She liked to speak in rhyming couplets.) (148)
- Mad Mary was a beautiful, a striking woman: a noble forehead, a prominent nose, ageless midnight skin and a long neck such as queens can only dream about. But it was her alarming eyes, which shot out anger on the brink of total collapse, that Samad was concentrated on, because he saw that they were speaking to him and him alone. Poppy had nothing to do with this. Mad Mary was looking at him with recognition. Mary Mary had spotted a fellow traveler. She had spotted the madman in him (which is to say, the _prophet_); he felt sure she had spotted the angry man, the masturbating man, the man stranded in the desert far from his sons, the foreign man in a foreign land, caught between borders... the man who, if you push him far enough, will suddenly see sense. Why else had she picked him from a street full of people? Simply because she had recognized him. Simply because they were from the same place, he and Mad Mary, which is to say: far away. (148-149)
- "Satyagraha. It is Sanskrit for 'truth and firmness.' Gandhi-gee's word. You see, he did not like 'passive resistance' or 'civil disobedience.' [...] Those words were not big enough for him. He wanted to show what we call weakness to be a strength. He understood that sometimes not to act is a man's greatest triumph. He was a Hindu. I am a Muslim." (149)
- "I am trying to say that life is a broad church, is it not?" He pointed to the ugly red-brick building full of its quivering believers. "With wide aisles." He pointed to the smelly bustle o black, white, brown, and yellow shuffling up and down the High Street. To the albino woman who stood outside the Cash and Carry, selling daisies picked from the churchyard. "Which my friend and I would like to continue walking along, if it is all right with you. Believe me, I understand your concerns," said Samad, taking his inspiration now from that other great North London streetpreacher, Ken Livingstone, "I am having difficulties myself -- we are all having difficulties in this country, this country which is new to us and old to us all at the same time. We are divided people, aren't we?" And here Samad did what no one had done to Mad Mary for well over 15 years: he touched her. Very lightly, on the shoulder. [-] "We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with my legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight the holy war. Jihad! And certainly we could argue this out in the street, but I think, in the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution -- it is not my solution. So I do not know what it is you would like me to say. Truth and firmness is one suggestion, though there are many other people you can ask if that answer does not satisfy. Personally, my hope lies in the last days. The prophet Muhammad -- peace be upon Him! -- tells us that on the Day of Resurrection everyone will be struck unconscious. Deaf and dumb. No chitchat. Tongueless. And what a bloody relief that will be. Now if you will excuse me."(149-50)
- Samad waited till the sun went down, bought a box of sticky Indian sweets, and turned into Roundwood Park; admired the last of the flowers. He talked and talked, the kind of talking that you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it. (150)
- Half thoughts. Stick them all together and you have less than you began with. (151)
- Poppy brightened a bit and smiled her half-sad, half-goofy smile. (151)
- O'Connell's is no place for strangers. O'Connell's is the kind of place family men come to for a different kind of family. Unlike blood relations, it is necessary here to earn one's position in the community; it takes years of devoted fucking around, time-wasting, lying-about, shooting the breeze, watching paint dry--far more dedication than men invest in the careless moment of procreation. You need to know the place. (153-54)
- This was not a metaphor. Mickey had a very large head, almost as if his acne had demanded more room and received planning permission. (155)
- Abdul-Mickey pushed a plate of festering carbohydrate to a sunken old man whose trousers were so high up his body they were gradually swallowing him whole. (156)
- "...how can I teach my boys anything, how can I show them the straight road when I have lost my own bearings?" (158)
- Then, as now, the question is always: what kind of world do I want my children to grow up in? (158)
- Archie tried to look shock and then tried disgusted, not knowing what to say. He liked people to get on with things, Archie. He kind of felt people should just live together, you know, in peace or harmony or something. (159)
- And that's what Archie loved about O'Connell's. Everything was remembered, nothing was lost. History was never revised or reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid and as simple as the encrusted rug on the clock. (160-161)
- If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. To Samad, as to the people of Thailand, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. That didn't mean he could live by them, abide by them, or grow in the manner they demanded, but roots were roots and roots were good. (161)
- ...for the first year in my memory each of my children has a vase of peonies on their windowsill. I had been suffering under the misapprehension all these years that I was simply an indifferent gardener -- when al the time it was that grand old tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow. (163)
- On the tube there was a youngish, prettyish girl, dark, Spanish-looking, mono-browed, crying. Just sitting opposite him, in a pair of big, pink leg-warmers, crying quite openly. Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. Everybody hoped she was getting off at Kilburn. But she kept on like that, just sitting, crying; West Hampstead, Finchley Road, Swiss Cottage, St. John's Wood. (168)
- Romantic, in a way. The way she said "Neil" as if it were a word bursting at the seams with past passion, with loss. That kind of flowing, feminine misery. (168)
- His head is full of his sons. He is half in dream this evening. He has once again bitten every nail beyond the cubicle and is fast approaching the translucent high-moons, the bleeding hubs. (171)
- Years from now, even hours after that plane leaves, this will be history that Samad tries not to remember. That his memory makes no effort to retain. A sudden stone submerged. False teeth floating silently to the bottom of a glass. (174)
- Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key ring or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year under the same cypress tree drawing the figure of 8 in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you -- or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this. (175-76)
- ...still she hated the thought that Magid should be as she had once been: holding on to a life no heavier than a paisa coin, wading thoughtlessly through floods, shuddering underneath the weight of black skies... (176)
- Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don't underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt. (177)
- ...he is the second son, late like a bus, late like cheap postage, the slowcoach, the catch-up kid, losing that first race down the birth canal, and now simply a follower by genetic predisposition, by the intricate design of Allah, the loser of two vital minutes that he would never make up, not in those all-seeing parabolic mirrors, not in those glassy globes of the godhead, not in his father's eyes. (181)
- "Personally, you know I would spit on Saint Paul, but the wisdom is correct, the wisdom is really Allah's: put away childish things. How can our boys become men when they are never challenged like men? Hmm?" (182)
- But the fact was Millat didn't need to go back home: he stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden. In his mind he was as much there as he was here. He did not require a passport to live in two places at once, he needed no visa to live his brother's life and his own (he was a twin, after all). (183)
- Now, segue to Millat, five thousand miles away, lowering himself down upon legendary sixth-former Natalia Cavendish (whose body is keeping a dark secret from her)... (183)
- Samad was first amused and then depressed by the items his wife and son determined essential, life-or-death things: Millat: Born to Run (album) by Springsteen, [...etc.]; Alsana: 3 pots of Tiger Balm, huge box of beedi cigarettes, Divargiit Singh in Moonshine over Kerala (musical video) [...etc.] (184-85)
- ...where a sheet of lightning lit up a scene of suburban apocalypse: oaks, cedars, sycamores, elms felled in garden after garden, fences down, garden furniture demolished. (185)
- "The quiet is always a bad sign. My grandmother -- God rest her -- she always said that. The quiet is just God pausing to take a breath before he shouts all over again. (189)
- Thunder went over the house like a dying man's bile, lightning followed like his final malediction, and Samad closed his eyes. (190)
- But he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be just a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a film-maker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in this country... (194)
- "Either everything is sacred or nothing is." (197)
- Samad looked at the happy people dancing on the wall and felt contempt and something more irritating underneath it that could have been jealousy. (199)
- "The gulf between books and experience," intoned Samad solemnly, "is a lonely ocean." (199)
- "That girl," tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, "swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time." (200)
- Often you see old men in the corner of dark pubs, discussing and gesticulating, using beer mugs and salt cellars to represent long-dead people and far-off places. At that moment they display a vitality missing in every other area of their lives. They light up. Unpacking a full story onto the table -- here is the Churchill-fork, over there is Czechslovakia-napkin, here we find the accumulation of German troops represented by a collection of cold peas -- they are reborn. But when Archie and Samad had these table-top debates during the eighties, knives and forks were not enough. The whole of the steamy Indian summer of 1857, the whole of that year of mutiny and massacre would be hauled into O'Connell's and brought to semiconsciousness by these two makeshift historians. The area stretching from the jukebox to the fruit machine became Delhi; Viv Richards silently complied as Pande's English superior, Captain Hearsay; Clarence and Denzel continued to play dominoes while simultaneously being cast as the restless sepoy hordes of the British army... (210)
- But, like a Chinese whisper, Fitchett's intoxicated, incompetent Pande had passed down a line of subsequent historians, the truth mutating, bending, receding as the whisper continued. (212)
- "That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read." (213)
- Wet men not being allowed in college libraries, they spent the morning drying off in a stuffy upstairs cafe, full of the right type of ladies having the right type of tea. (214)
- "It's only an artist's impression." (215)
- There was quiet for a minute. Archibald watched three sugar cubes dissolve in his teacup. (216)
- ...said Archie Jones, with a cryptic look his friend would have thought an impossible feat for those sagging, chubby features. (217)
- You, you, you, Miss Jones, with your strategically placed arms and cardigan, tied around the arse (the endless mystery: how to diminish that swollen enormity, the Jamaican posterior?), with your belly-reducing panties and breast-reducing bra, with your meticulous Lycra corseting -- the much-lauded nineties answer to whalebone -- with your elasticized waists. She knew the ad was talking to her. But she didn't know quite what it was saying. (222)
- Irie Jones was obsessed. Occasionally her worried mother cornered her in the hallway before she slunk out of the door, picked at her elaborate corsetry, asked, "What's up with you? What in the Lord's anme are you wearing? How can you breathe? Irie, my love, you're fine -- you're just built like an honest-to-God Bowden -- don't you know you're fine?" [-] But Irie didn't know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a strange land. [-] Nightmares and daydreams, on the bus, in the bath, in class. Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation from Jamaican hourglass heavy with the sands that gather round Dunns River Falls, to English Rose -- oh, you know her -- she's a slender, delicate thing not made for the hot sun, a surf board rippled by the wave: Before, After. (222)
- Puberty, real full-blown puberty (not the slight mound of a breast, or the shadowy emergence of fuzz), had separated these old friends, Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal. Different sides of the school fence. Irie believed she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buckteeth and thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair, and to top it off mole-ish eyesight that in turn required Coke-bottle spectacles in a light shade of pink. (Even those blue eyes -- the eyes Archie had been so excited about -- lasted 2 weeks only. She had been born with them, yes, but one day Clara looked again and there were brown eyes staring up at her, like the transition between a closed bud and an open flower, the exact moment of which the naked, waiting eye can never detect). And this belief in her ugliness, in her wrongness, had subdued her; she kept her smart-ass comments to herself these days, she kept her right hand on her stomach. She was all wrong. (224)
- Whereas Millat was like youth remembered in the nostalgic eyeglass of old age, beauty parodying itself: broken Roman nose, tall, thin; lightly veined, smoothly muscled; chocolate eyes with a reflective green sheen like moonlight bouncing off a dark sea; irresistible smile, big white teeth. In Glendard Oak Comprehensive, black, Pakistani, Greek, Irish -- these were races. But those with sex appeal lapped the other runners. They were a species all of their own. (224)
- Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belong nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It was this soft underbelly that made him most beloved, most adored by Irie and the nice oboe-playing, long-skirted middle-class girls, most treasured by these hair-flicking and fugue-singing females; he was their dark prince, occasional lover or impossible crush, the subject of sweaty fantasy and ardent dreams... [-] He was also their project: what was to be done about Millat? [...] Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him. Everybody's bit of rough, Millat Iqbal. (225)
- Irie looked at Mrs. Roody. She was the color of strawberry mousse. (227)
- ...intent upon transformation, intent upon fighting her genes... (227)
- It was dark in Roshi's and smelled strongly of the same scent as P.K.'s: ammonia and coconut oil, pain mixed with pleasure. From the dim glow given off by a flickering light, Irie could see there were no shelves to speak of but instead hair products that piled like mountains from the floor up, while accessories (combs, bands, nail varnish) were stapled to the walls with the price written in felt-tip alongside. (232-33)
- Irie rolled her eyes. Sometimes you want to be different. And sometimes you'd give the hair on your head to be the same as everybody else. (237)
- "He learns nothing from a man who knows nothing! Where is his beard? Where is his khamise? Where is his humility? If Allah says there will be storm, there will be storm. If he says earthquake, it will be earthquake. Of course it has to be! That is the very reason I sent the child there -- to understand that essentially we are weak, that we are not in control. What does Islam mean? What does the word, the very word, mean? I surrender. I surrender to God. I surrender to him. This is not my life, this is his life. This life I call mine is his to do with what he will. Indeed, I shall be tossed and turned on the wave, and there shall be nothing to be done. Nothing! Nature itself is Muslim, because it obeys the laws the creator has ingrained in it." (240)
- "But we, we do not automatically obey. We are tricky, we are the tricky bastards, we humans. We have the evil inside us, the free will. We must learn to obey." (240)
- Smoking was the answer to their universe, their 42, their raison d'etre. They were passionate about fags. They pulled at them like babies at teats, and when they were finally finished their eyes were wet as they ground the butts into the mud. They fucking loved it. Fags, fags, fags. Their only interest outside fags was politics, or more precisely, this fucker, the chancellor, who kept on putting up the price of fags. Because there never was enough money and there never enough fags. You had to become an expert in bumming, cadging, begging, stealing fags. (242)
- ..then, if the day is cold and the need for a fag overwhelming, "last toke!" But last toke is only for the desperate; it is beyond the perforation, beyond the brand name of the cigarette, beyond what could reasonably be described as the butt. Last toke is the yellowing fabric of the roach, containing the stuff that is less than tobacco, the stuff that collects in the lungs like a time bomb, destroys the immune system, and brings permanent, sniffling, nasal flu. The stuff that turns white teeth yellow. (242-43)
- ...the burden of the prophet... (243)
- He had a deep, soft voice like running water, inevitable and constant, requiring a force stronger than the sudden appearance of Irie, stronger, maybe, than gravity, to stop it. (244)
- He continued like this, one word flowing from another, with no punctuation or breath and with the same chocolatey delivery -- one could almost climb into his sentences, one could almost fall asleep in them. (244)
- The headmaster of Glenard Oak was in a continual state of implosion. His hairline had gone out and stayed out like a determined tide, his eye sockets were deep, his lips had been sucked backward into his mouth, he had no body to speak of, or rather he folded what he had into a small, twisted package, sealing it with a pair of crossed arms and crossed legs. As if to counter this personal, internal collapse, the headmaster had the seating arranged in a large circle, an expansive gesture... (248)
- Godly singing. Hand-clapping. Weeping and wailing. Noise and heat and ecstatic movement coming from church after church and moving through the thick air of Jamaica like a choir invisible. Now, there was something, thought Sir Edmund. For, unlike many of his expatriate peers, who branded the singing caterwauling and accused it of being heathen, Sir Edmund had always been touched by the devotion of Jamaican Christians. He liked the idea of a jolly church, where one could sniff or cough or make a sudden movement without the vicar looking at one queerly. Sir Edmund felt certain that God, in all his wisdom, had never meant church to be a stiff-collared, miserable affair as it was in Tunbridge Wells, but rather a joyous thing, a singing and dancing thing, a foot-stamping, hand-clapping thing. The Jamaicans understood this. Sometimes it seemed to be the only thing they did understand. (253)
- Sir Edmund, who was a fairly corpulent man, a man who looked as if he might be hiding another man within him... (253)
- (These are old secrets. They will come out like wisdom teeth when the time is right.) (254)
- At the magic word funding, the headmaster's sunken eyes began to disappear beneath agitated lids. (256)
- In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant. (257-58)
- The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring, which are better able to cope with a changed environment. (258)
- Sisters, the bottom line is this: if we are to continue wearing flowers in our hair into the next decade, they must be handy and ever at hand, something only the truly mothering gardener can ensure. If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even she requires the occasional helping hand! - Joyce Chalfen, from The New Flower Power (258)
- The popularity of The New Flower Power surprised no one more than Joyce. It had practically written itself, taking only 3 months, most of which she spent dressed in a tiny T-shirt and a pair of briefs in an attempt to beat the heat, breast-feeding Joshua intermittently, almost absentmindedly, and thinking to herself, between easy-flowing paragraphs, that this was exactly the life she had hoped for. This was the future she dared to envisage when she first saw Marcus's intelligent little eyes giving her big white legs the once-over as she crossed the quad of his Oxbridge college, miniskirted, seven years earlier. She was one of those people who knew immediately, at first sight, even as her future spouse opened his mouth to say an initial, nervous hello. (258)
- ...and then she'd be satisfied, padding back to her office like a big cat with a cub in its jaws, covered in a light layer of happy sweat. (259)
- Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally healthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and, unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful, and only ever political or intellectual topics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soul/body dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway. (261)
- Bottom line: the Chalfens didn't need other people. They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs, and occasionally adjectives: It's the Chalften way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He's Chalfening again, We need to be a bit more Chalfenist about this. (261)
- Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothing to cultivate... Sometimes when the Chalfens sat round their Sunday diner, tearing apart a chicken until there was nothing left but a tattered ribcage, gobbling silently, speaking only to retrieve the salt or the pepper -- the boredom was palpable. The century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection. Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin, Benjamin to Jack ad naseam across the meat and veg. They were still the remarkable family they had always been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers -- judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors, and other frivolous professions Chalfens sneered at -- there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers of the Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce. (262)
- It was when she finished breast-feeding Oscar that she threw herself back into gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her. (262)
- Yes. Thrips have good instincts : essentially they are charitable, productive organisms which help the plan in its development. Thrips mean well, but thrips go too far, thrips go beyond pollinating and eating pests; thrips begin to eat the plant itself, to eat it from within. (263)
- Pulchritude -- beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her checkbook to behind the thick glass of a bank till. (264)
- As soon as Millat was out of earshot, and as Marcus brought over the teas, the years seemed to fall like dead skin from Joyce and she bent across the table like a schoolgirl. (266)
- She's never been this close to this strange and beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. It was both strange and wondrous. She felt like a prude who walks through a nudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed Arawaks, not knowing where to look. (267)
- Irie thought of her own parents, whose touches were now virtual, existing only in the absences where both sets of fingers had previously been: the remote control, the biscuit-tin lid, the light switches. (267)
- "I wrote about one Dominican woman in The Inner Life of Houseplants who had moved her potted azalea through 6 different men's houses; once by the windowsill, then in a dark corner, then in the south-facing bedroom, et cetera." (268)
- Wrong question. It wasn't the parents, it wasn't just one generation, it was the whole century. Not the bud but the bush. (270)
- But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears -- dissolution, disappearance. (272)
- She had a nebulous 15-year-old's passion for them, overwhelming, yet with no real direction or object. She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge, with them. (272)
- To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. When Irie stepped over the threshold of the Chalfens house, she felt an illicit thrill, like a Jew munching a sausage or a Hindu grabbing a Big Mac. She was crossing borders, sneaking into England; it felt like some terribly mutinous act, wearing somebody else's uniform or somebody else's skin.
- "And then later..." Joyce allowed the rest of her sentence to get jammed in the kitchen door just as her eldest son slammed in.
- Marcus's room was like no place Irie had ever seen. It had no communal utility, no other purpose in the house apart from being Marcus's room; it stored no toys, bric-a-brac, broken things, spare ironing boards; no one ate in it, slept in it, or made love in it. It wasn't like Clara's attic space, a Kubla Khan of crap, all carefully stored in boxes and labeled just in case she should ever need to flee this land for another one. (It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants -- packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends -- that stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.) Marcus's room was purely devoted to Marcus and Marcus's work.)
- ...the Chalfen family tree, an elaborate illustrated oak that stretched back into the 1600s and forward into the present day. (280)
- "Nonsensical statement. We all go back as far as each other. It's just that the Chalfens have always written things down." said Marcus thoughtfully, stuffing his pipe with fresh tobacco. "It helps if you want to be remembered."
- On his chin the tumors hung like big droplets of dirty rain.
- Marcus looked up at her from where he was kneeling. She was like a mountain range from that angle; a soft and pillowy version of the Andes.
jul 12 2020 ∞
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