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- It was a little like being hypnotized or sitting in a dense cloud, and through the mist she heard snippets of dinner conversation continuing without her.
- A million double entendres were sitting at the back of her throat, and, if she opened her mouth even a slit(!), she feared one of the was going to come out. Marcus, who was always oblivious to causing offense, chundled on happily. "You two are terrible temptation for a man." (289)
- The silence was long, broad, and malingering.
- But, as is the way with these things, once confirmation had arrived nobody knew quite what to do with the information.
- Millat disappeared for weeks at a time, returning with money that was not his and an accent that modulated wildly between the rounded tones of the Chalfens and the street talk of the KEVIN clan. ...Millat was neither one thing nor the other, this or that, Muslim or Christian, Englishman or Bengali; he lived for the in between, he lived up to his middle name, Zulfikar, the clashing of two swords.
- A little English education can be a dangerous thing.
- "The English are the only people," she would say with distaste, "who want to teach you and steal from you at the same time."
- Her own mother, when inside her mother (for if this story is to be told, we will have to put them all back inside each other like Russian dolls, Irie back in Clara, Clara back in Hortense, Hortense back in Ambrosia)...
- ...and, like any convert, Mrs. Brenton took great pleasure in the conversion of others. She found two easy, willing subjects in Ambrosia and the child in her belly, for they had nothing to convert from.
- "Early will I seek thee... My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is..." ...So sang Ambrosia as her pregnancy reached full term, and she bounced with her huge bulge down King Street, praying for the return of Christ or the return of Charlie Durham -- the 2 men who could save her -- so alike in her mind she had the habit of mixing them up.
- Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. Outside Ambrosia there was much white stone, no people, an altar peeling gold, little light, smoking candles, Spanish names engraved in the floor, and a large marble madonna, her head bowed, standing high upon a plinth. All was preternaturally calm as Glenard began to touch her. But inside, there was a galloping heartbeat, the crush of a million muscles that wanted desperately to repel Glenard's attempts at an education, the clammy fingers that even now were at her breast, slipping between thin cotton and squeezing nipples already heavy with milk, milk never intended for such a rough mouth. Inside she was already running down King Street. But outside Ambrosia was frozen. Rooted to the spot, as feminine a stone as any madonna. - And then the world began to shake. Inside Ambrosia, waters broke. Outside Ambrosia, the floor cracked. The far wall crumbled, the stained-glass exploded, and the madonna fell from a great height like a swooning angel... (299)
- It is not that ...he doesn't love her (oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly) ...Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending. (299)
- ...Kingston fallen into the sea, starvation, terror, whole streets swallowed up by the earth -- and none of this horrifies him as much as the realization that he might never see her again. Now he understands what love means. He stands in the parade ground, lonely and distraught, surrounded by a thousand black faces he does not recognize; the only other white figure is the statue of Victoria... (300)
- It is a strange feeling, this powerlessness; to discover there is another country more equipped to save this little island than the English. It is a strange feeling, looking out on to an ocean of ebony skin, unable to find the one he loves, the one he thinks he owns. (300)
- The rest is that terrible thing: history. (301)
- One sentence torn from Job: I will fetch my knowledge from afar. (Hortense kept the Bible it was ripped from and liked to say that from that day forth no Bowden woman took lessons from anyone but the Lord.) (301)
- ...in these aims, what instinct is fundamental? What is the root, the dream that ties these ambitions together? To make sense of the world. To eliminate the random. (304)
- ...surely you go straight to the soul of the human condition as dramatically and fundamentally as any poet, except you are armed with something essential that the poet does not have: the truth. (304)
- ...the Roman nose, the eyes like a dark sea, the skin like chocolate, the hair like curtains of black silk, or maybe just his pure, simple stink... There have always been and always will be people who simply exude sex (who breathe it, who sweat it). A few examples from thin air: the young Brando, Madonna, Cleopatra, Pam Grier, Valentino, a girl called Tamara who lives opposite the London Hippodrome, right slap in the middle of town; Imran Khan, Michaelangelo's David. You can't fight that kind of marvelous indiscriminate power, for it is not always symmetry or beauty per se that does it (Tamara's nose is ever so slightly bent), and there are no means by which you can gain it. Surely the oldest American sentence is relevant here, pertinent to matters economic, politic, and romantic: you either got it or you don't. And Millat had it. In spades. (306)
- "You could be a great leader of men, Millat... But at the moment you are half the man. We need the whole man." (308)
- There was something welcoming about Karina Cain's little belly. (309)
- That evening after work, Millat saw a moon-faced, demure-looking Indian woman through the window of a Piccadilly cafe who looked, in profile, not unlike youthful pictures of his mother. She was dressed in a black turtleneck and long black trousers and her eyes were partly veiled by long black hair, her only decoration the red patterns of mhendi on the palms of her hands. She was sitting alone. (310)
- Hookah pipes, halal fried chicken, and illegally imported absinthe consumed around wobbling outdoor tables; watching the women hurry by in full purdah, like busy black ghosts haunting the streets, late-night shopping, looking for their errant husbands. Millat liked to watch them go: the animated talk, the exquisite colors of the communicative eyes, the bursts of laughter from invisible lips. He remembered something his father once told him back when they used to speak to each other. You do not know the meaning of the erotic, Millat, you do not know the meaning of desire, my second son, until you have sat on the Edgware Road with a bubbling pipe, using all the powers of your imagination to visualize what is beyond the four inches of skin hajib reveals, what is under those great sable sheets. (311)
- ..wringing her hand; the smell of dope mingling with the steam that rose off endless cups of strawberry tea. (311)
- Her A-levels were chemistry, biology, and religious studies. She wanted to study dentistry (white collar! $20k+!), which everyone was very pleased about, but she also wanted to take a "year off" in the subcontinent and Africa (Malaria! Poverty! Tapeworm!), which led to 3 months of open warfare between her and Clara. (312)
- "...Mum? Can you please sit up and speak properly? I'm trying to talk to you? It seems like I'm talking to myself here?" said Irie with absurd intonations, for this was the year Antipodean operas were teaching a generation of English kids to phrase everything as a question. "Look, I want your permission, yeah?" (313)
- The midnight voice. The perfect daytime straightness and whiteness. (314)
- But Irie was 16 and everything feels deliberate at that age. (314)
- O what a tangled web we weave. Millat was right: these parents were damaged people, missing hands, missing teeth. These parents were full of information you wanted to know but were too scared to hear. (314)
- She thought about the Chalfens for half a second, but she knew already there were no answers there, only more places to escape. (314)
- The only thing missing was Darcus (who Irie only faintly remembered as a mixture of smell and texture; naphthalene and damp wool); there was his huge empty chair, still fetid, and there was his television, still on. (316)
- A winter morning was the only time worth spending in that basement flat. Between 5:00 and 6:00 A.M., when the sun was still low, light shot through the front window, bathed the living room in yellow, dappled the long thin allotment (7 ft x 30 ft), an gave a healthy veneer to the tomatoes. ...The glare was such that you couldn't make out the railway sidings where the strip of green ended, or the busy everyday feet that passed by the window, kicking dust through the grating at the glass. It was all white light and clever shade at six in the morning. Hugging a cup of tea at the kitchen table, squinting at the grass, Irie saw vineyards out there... Then the mirage, sun-reliant as it was, disappeared, the whole scene swallowed by a devouring cloud. Leaving only some crumbling Edwardian housing. Railway sidings named after a careless child. A long, narrow strip of allotment where next to nothing would grow. And a bleached-out bandy-legged redheaded man with terrible posture and Wellington boots, stamping away in the frosty mulch, trying to shake the remnants of a squashed tomato from his heel. (319)
- But the voice was a visual in itself: Cockney yet refined, a voice that had much work done upon it -- missing key consonants and adding others where they were never meant to be, and all delivered through the nose with only the slightest help from the mouth. (32!)
- "But the Lord ain't interested in the vanities of the flesh, now, is he?" ... "Jehoavh is in need of your _soul._" (32!)
- Ryan's sentence faded into a general Erhummmm, a sound he was prone to making. It began in his arched nostrils and reverberated through his slight, elongated, misshapen limps like the final shiver of a hanged man. (321)
- But how fragile is Clara's atheism! Like one of those tiny glass does Hortense keeps in the living-room cabinet -- a breath would knock it over. Talking of which, Clara still holds hers when passing churches the same way adolescent vegetarians scurry by butchers. (326)
- ...and Clara has been in that house through the winters. She knows what it means. Oh, wonderfully bright at 6:00 A.M., yes, wonderfully clear for an hour. But the shorter the days, the longer the nights, the darker the house, the easier it is, the easier it is, to mistake a shadow for the writing on the wall, the sound of overland footsteps for the distant crack of thunder, and the midnight chime of a New Year clock for the bell that tolls the end of the world. (327)
- Bowdenism gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "hand-to-mouth." This was living in the eternal instant, ceaselessly teetering on the precipice of total annihilation; there are people who take a great deal of drugs simply to experience something comparable to 84-year-old Hortense Bowden's day-to-day existence. So you've seen dwarfs rip open their bellies and show you their insides, you've been a television switched off without warning, you've experienced the whole world as one Krishna consciousness, free of individual ego, floating through the infinite cosmos of the soul? Big fucking deal. (327)
- Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop... (327)
- In this life there are them that are teachers, and them that are pupils. (329)
- You become so used to extremity, suddenly nothing else will do. (329)
- In cupboards and neglected drawers and in grimy frames were the secrets that had been hoarded for so long... (330)
- ...her great-grandmother Ambrosia, a bony, beautiful thing, with huge almond eyes... (330)
- She laid claim to the past -- her version of the past -- aggressively, as if retrieving misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to her, her birthright, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found, collecting bits and pieces (birth certificates, maps, army reports, news articles) and storing them under the sofa, so that as if by osmosis the richness of them would pass through the fabric while she as sleeping and seep right into her. (331)
- "So, my question to the panel is, how do you keep up appearances in the bleak midwinter?" (331)
- "I think the winter should be a time of rest, subdued colors, you know -- and then when the late spring does finally arrive the neighbors get a hell of a shock! Boom! There it is, this wonderful explosion of growth. I think the deep winter is really a time for nurturing the soil, turning it over, allowing it a rest and plotting its future all the better to surprise the nosy people next door. I always think of a garden's soil like a woman's body -- moving in cycles, you know, fertile at some times and not others, and that's really quite natural. But if you really are determined, then Lenten roses -- Helleborus corsicus -- do remarkably well in cold, calcerous soil... (332)
- 4 months in the life of a 17-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts; Stones fans into Beatles fans; Tories into Liberal Democrats and back again, vinyrl junkies to CD freaks. Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul. (334)
- "These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers -- who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made the devil's pact... it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere." (336)
- "And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?"
- And what he really meant was: do we speak the same language? Are we from the same place? Are we the same?
- A sentence, Samad's sentence, was passing through Irie's tired brain.
- Hortense kissed Irie on both cheeks and Irie smiled at the hot wetness.
- In the outside world, outside of his college and home, one had to add things to speech. ...You had to add things to your speech to make it more palatable. Niceties, throwaway phrases, pleases and thank yous. (344)
- Of course, he understood the work he did involved some element of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door. No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting through his century or the next without blood on his palms. But stop the work? Gag Einstein? Tie Heisenberg's hands? What can you hope to achieve?
- There was no rhyme nor reason for so much of what people did.
- Magid's face grew radiant and revealed a lopsided smile of much angelic charm. "Well, Marcus, my dear man, you are the only white fellow at gate 32." (350)
- It was Magid who encouraged him out of the laboratory, taking him by the hand squinting into the sunlit world where people were calling for him. (352)
- Magid would write while Marcus spoke, translating his words into elegant English, turning the bald statements of a scientist uninterested in moral debates into the polished arguments of a philosopher. (352)
- Irie looked him square in the face. There was something in there she had been unable to put her finger on these 4 months, because it was obscured by his youth, his looks, his clean clothes, and her personal hygiene. Now she saw it clearly. He was touched by it -- the same as Mad Mary, the Indian with the white face and the blue lips, and the guy who carried his wig around on a piece of string. The same as those people who walk the Willesden streets with no intention of buying Black Label beer or stealing a stereo, collecting the dole or pissing in an alleyway. The ones with a wholly different business. Prophecy. And Magid had it in his face. He wanted to tell you and tell you and tell you. (355)
- "Sometimes people don't know what they want. They don't know what they need. Those boys need each other like..." Joyce thought for a moment. She was bad with metaphor. In a garden you never planted something where something else was meant to be. (358)
- And most of all, the double meaning of the word cleave. Did he know which was worse, which more traumatic: pulling together or tearing apart? (359)
- He peered down the hallway at the shadowy form of Joyce through the glass and scratched his testicles, sadly. Samad was in his television mode: garish v-neck, stomach swelling like a tight hot-water bottle beneath it, long moth-eaten dressing gown, and a pair of paisley boxer shorts from which two stick legs, the legacy of his youth, protruded. in his television mode, action escaped him. (362)
- Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets... one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved. And the woman was right, one didn't do it for one's health. Nothing this late in the century was done with health in mind. Alsana was no dummy when it came to the Modern Condition. ...] No one is wanting this, no one is willing it -- they are just involved, see? They walk IN and get trapped between the revolving doors of those two v's. Involved. The years pass, and the mess accumulates and here we are. Your brother's sleeping with my ex-wife's niece's second cousin. Involved. Just a tired, inevitable fact. Something in the way Joyce said it, involved -- wearied, slightly acid -- suggested to Alsana that the word meant the same thing to her. An enormous web you spin to catch yourself. (363)
- The mug of tea plonked in front of Joyce a few minutes later was gray with a rim of scum and thousands of little microbes flitting through it, less micro than one would have hoped. Alsana gave Joyce a moment to consider it. (364)
- Alsana, little pressure cooker that she was, blew. (365)
- "Maybe, maybe, Mrs. Chalfen, but you are the salt in the wound, yes? You are the one extra chili pepper in the hot sauce." (366)
- For therein lay the problem. Number four. Purging oneself of the West. (368)
- ...waiting for two pairs of eyes, like two of Scorsese's cameras, to pan on to his face and focus. (369)
- "So: what is it I can get you, Magid?" Mickey leaned over the counter, all concern, like an overattentive shopgirl. "Eggs? Mushrooms? Beans? Fried slice?" (369)
- "Did you come by way of the Ganges?" inquired Samad irritably, shifting up to make space for him. (374)
- Crazy enough to start a war. There aren't many people like that. Most of us just follow along once war has been announced. But some people wish to bring things to a head. Some people march onto the parade ground and fire the first shot. Your brother is one of them. (376)
- The coin rose and flipped as a coin would rise and flip every time in a perfect world, flashing its light and then revealing its dark enough times to mesmerize a man. Then, at some point in its triumphant ascension, it began to arc, and the arc went wrong, and Archibald realized that it was not coming back to him at all but going behind him, a fair way behind him, and he turned with the others to watch it complete an elegant swoop toward the pinball machine and somersault straight into the slot. Immediately the huge old beast lit up; the ball shot off and began its chaotic, noisy course around a labyrinth of swinging doors, automatic bats, tubes, and ringing bells, until, with no one to assist it, no one to direct it, it gave up the ghost and dropped back into the swallowing hole. (377)
- A neutral place. The chances of finding one these days are slim, maybe even slimmer than Archie's pinball trick. The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And not only must the place be neutral, but the messenger who takes you there, and the messenger who sends the messenger. There are no people or places like that left... (378)
- "No, Joyce, love's not the fucking reason." Irie was standing on the Chalfen doorstep, watching her own substantial breath in the freezing night air. "It's a four-letter word that sells life insurance and hair conditioner." (378)
- She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of a tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations. Despite opting for a life of dentistry, she had not yet lost all of the poetry in her soul, that is, she could still have the odd Proustian moment, note layers upon layers, though she often experienced them in periodontal terms. She got a twinge -- as happens with a sensitive tooth, or in a "phantom tooth," when the nerve is exposed -- she felt a twinge walking past the garage where she and Millat, aged 13, had passed 150 pennies over the counter, stolen from an Iqbal jam jar, in a desperate attempt to buy a packet of fags. She felt an ache (like a severe malocclusion, the pressure of one tooth upon another) when she passed the park where they had cycled as children, where they smoked their first joint, where he had kissed her once in the middle of a storm. Irie wished she could give herself over to these past-present fictions: wallow in them, make them sweeter, longer, particularly the kiss. But she had in her hand a cold key, and surrounding her lives that were stranger than fiction, funnier than fiction, crueler than fiction, and with consequences fiction can never have. She didn't want to be involved in the long story of those lives, but she was, and she found herself dragged forward by the hair to their denouement... ...You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them.
- Lacking experience in this field, it was natural that Irie should mistake the palpitations that come with blood restriction for smoldering passion. (380)
- ...making love on a prayer mat. (381)
- He made sure he did all these things perfectly because he believed he was being watched by the great camera in the sky. (381)
- It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll -- then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are soconvinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of that worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
- ...and when he came she was gratified to note it was with a little sigh as if something had been taken from him. But she was wrong to think this a victory. It was simply because he knew immediately where she had been, why she was here, and it saddened him. For a long time they lay in silence together, naked, the autumn light disappearing from the room with every minute that passed. - "It seems to me," said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, "that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that." - Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
- The brothers begin to argue. It escalates in moments, and they make a mockery of that idea, a neutral place; instead they cover the room with history -- past, present, and future history (for there is such a thing) -- they take what was blank and smear it with the stinking shit of the past like excitable, excremental children. They cover this neutral room in themselves. Every gripe, the earliest moments, every debated principle, every contested belief. (383)
- Because we often imagine that immigrants are constantly on the move, footloose, able to change course at any moment, able to employ their legendary resourcefulness at every turn. We have been told of the resourcefulness of Mr. Schmutters, or the footloosity of Mr. Banajii, who sail into Ellis Island or Dover or Calais and step into their foreign lands as blank people, free of any kind of baggage, happy and willing to leave their difference at the docks and take their chances in this new place, merging with the oneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree. - Whatever road presents itself, they will take, and if it happens to lead to a dead end, well then, Mr. Schmutters and Mr. Banajii will merrily set upon another, weaving their way through Happy Multicultural Land. Well, good for them. But Magid and Millat couldn't manage it. They left that neutral room as they had entered it: weighed down, burdened, unable to waver from their course or in any way change their separate, dangerous trajectories. They seem to make no progress. The cynical might say they don't even move at all -- that Magid and Millat are two of Zeno's headfuck arrows, occupying a space equal to themselves and, what is scarier, equal to Mangal Pande's, equal to Samad Iqbal's. Two brothers trapped in the temporal instant. Two brothers who pervert all attempts to put dates to this story, to track these guys, to offer times and days, because there isn't, wasn't, and never will be any duration. In fact, nothing moves. Nothing changes. They are running at a standstill. Zeno's paradox.
- The harder Achilles tries to catch the tortoise, the more eloquently the tortoise expresses its advantage. Likewise, the brothers will race toward the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they have just been. Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, emigres, travelers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
- KEVIN: an extremist faction dedicated to direct, often violent action, a splinter group frowned on by the rest of the Islamic community; popular with the sixteen-to-twenty-five age group; feared and ridiculed in the press; and gathered tonight in the Kilburn Hall, standing on chairs packed to the rafters, listening to the speech of their founder. (390)
- The huge stomach he rested on his knee like a friend. (393)
- By the time Crispin emerged from jail, FATE had grown fourfold, and Crispin's legend (lover, fighter, rebel, hero), had grown with it, fueled by Joely's passionate interpretation of his life and works and a carefully chosen photo of him circa 1980 in which he looked a bit like Nick Drake. (397)
- Instead he gave up all meat, ran off to Glastonbury, got a tattoo, became the kind of guy who could measure an 8th with his eyes closed (so fuck you, Millat), and generally had a ball... (399)
- "And thus are you made the secretary of the devil... thus is you yourself laid low."
- He witnessed the artificial insemination. And he witnessed the birth, so different from his own. One mouse only. No battle down the birth canal, no first and second, no saved and unsaved. No potluck. No random factors. No you have your father's snout and your mother's love of cheese. No mysteries lying in wait. No doubt as to when death will arrive. No hiding from illness, no running from pain. No question about who was pulling the strings. No doubtful omnipotence. No shaky fate. No question of a journey, no question of greener grass, for wherever this mouse went, its life would be precisely the same. It would not travel through time (and Time's a bitch, Magid knew that much now. Time is the bitch), because its future was equal to its present, which was equal to its past. A Chinese box of a mouse. No other roads, no missed opportunities, no parallel possibilities. No second-guessing, no what-ifs, no might-have-beens. Just certainty. Just certainty in its purest form. And what more, thought Magid--once the witnessing was over, once the mask and gloves were removed, once the white coat was returned to its hook--what more is God than that? (405)
- It was New Years Eve, but Josh was having a hard time believing that. Where had the time gone? It had seeped between the crack in Joely's legs, run into the secret pockets of her ears, hidden itself in the warm, matted hair of her armpits. And the consequences of what he was about to do, on this biggest day of his life, a critical situation that 3 months ago he would have dissected, compartmentalized, weighed up, and analyzed with Chalfenist vigor--that too had escaped him into her crevices. He had made no real decisions this New Years Eve, no resolutions. (407)
- "It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?" (410)
- Joely kept on talking, and Josh kept on nodding in the necessary places, but the hardcore Thai weed he was smoking had lassoed one word of hers -- calm -- and reined it in as a question. Why so calm, Joshi? You're about to get in some pretty serious shit -- why so calm? - Because he imagined he seemed calm from the outside, preternaturally calm, his adrenaline enjoying an inverse relationship with the rising New Year sap, with the jittery nerves of the FATE posse; and the effect of the skunk on top of it all... it was like walking under water, deep under water, while children played above. But it wasn't calm so much as inertia. And he couldn't work out, as the van progressed down Whitehall, whether this was the right reaction -- to let the world wash over him, to let events take their course -- or whether he should be more like those people, those people out there, whooping, dancing, fighting, fucking... whether he should be more -- what was that horrible late-20th-century tautology? Proactive. More proactive in the face of the future. (411)
- It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. What he was about to do to his father was so huge, so colossal, that the consequences were inconceivable -- he couldn't imagine a moment occurring after that act. Only blankness. Nothingness. Something like the end of the world. And facing the end of the world, or even just the end of the year, had always given Josh a strangely detached feeling. - Every New Year's Eve is an impending apocalypse in miniature. You fuck where you want, you puke where you want, you punch who you want to punch -- the huge gatherings in the street; the television roundups of the goodies and baddies of time past; the frantic final kisses; the 10! 9! 8! - Joshua glared up and down Whitehall, at the happy people going about their dress rehearsal. They were all confident that it wouldn't happen or certain they could deal with it if it did. But the world happens to you, thought Joshua, you don't happen to the world. There's nothing you can do. For the first time in his life, he truly believed that. And Marcus Chalfen believed the direct opposite.
- It was the second day of Ramadan and he was stoned. Every synapse in his body had clocked out for the evening and gone home. (413)
- And as a result, he was so stoned now, standing on the platform with the rest, so stoned that he could not only hear sounds within sounds but sounds within sounds within sounds. He could hear the mouse scurrying along the tracks, creating a higher level of harmonious rhythm with the crackle of the PA system and the off beat sniff of an elderly woman 20 feet away. Even when the train pulled in, he could still hear these things beneath the surface. Now, there is a level of stoned that you can be, Millat knew, that is just so very very stoned that you reach a level of Zen-like sobriety and come out the other side feeling absolutely tip-top as if you'd never sparked up in the first place. (413)
- They were massively attracted by the fact that he had renounced women and the more he renounced them, the more successful he became. Of course this equation could only work for so long... (416)
- So now they were taking up half the bus in their attempts to sit alone. (424)
- The bus did one of those arching corners where it feels like the merest breath will topple it over. (424)
- "What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they've got behind it is a bathroom or a living room. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody's old historical shit all over the place. They're not constantly making the same old mistakes. They're not always hearing the same old shit. They don't do public performances of angst on public transport. Really, these people exist. I'm telling you. The biggest traumas of their lives are things like recarpeting. Bill-paying. Gate-fixing. They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. Go on, ask them. And they'll tell you. No mosque. Maybe a little church. Hardly any sin. Plenty of forgiveness. No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers. I will put 20 quid down now that Samad is the only person here who knows the inside bloody leg measurements of his great-grandfather. And you know why they don't know? Because it doesn't fucking matter. As far as they're concerned, it's the past. This is what it's like in other families. They're not self-indulgent. They don't run around, relishing, relishing the fact that they are utterly dysfunctional. They don't spend their time trying to find ways to make their lives more complex. They just get on with it. Lucky bastards. Lucky motherfuckers." (426)
- The enormous adrenaline rush that sprang from this peculiar outburst surged through Irie's body, increased her heartbeat to a gallop and tickled the nerve ends of her unborn child, for Irie was 8 weeks pregnant and she knew it. What she didn't know, and what she realized she may never know (the very moment she saw the ghostly pastel blue lines materialize on the home test, like the fact of the madonna in the zucchini of an Italian housewife), was the identity of the father. No test on earth would tell her. Same thick black hair. Same twinkling eyes. Same habit of chewing the tops of pens. Same shoe size. Same deoxyribonucleic acid. She could not know her body's decision, what choice it had made, in the race to the gamete, between the saved and the unsaved. She could not know if the choice would make any difference. Because whichever brother it was, it was the other one too. She would never know. (426)
- "You all right, love?" Archie asked (Irie), after a long period of silence had set in, putting his big pink hand, which was dotted with liver-spots like tea stains, on her knee. "A lot on your chest, then." (427)
- ...they know what they want, especially those who've lived in this country, forced from one space to another like Mr. De Winter (ne Wojciech), renamed, rebranded, the answer to every questionnaire nothing nothing space please just space nothing please nothing space (429)
- Archie smiles. Mickey's the kind of guy you want to watch the footie with, or the cricket, or if you see a fight in the street you want him to be there, because he's kind of a commentator on life. Kind of a philosopher. He's quite frustrated in his daily existence because he doesn't get much opportunity to show that side of himself. But get him free of his apron and away from the oven, give him the space to maneuver -- he really comes into his own. Archie's got a lot of time for Mickey. A lot of time. (432)
- "...It's Science." Archie says Science the same way he says Modern, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them. " Science, " Archie repeats, handling it more firmly, "is a different kettle of fish." (432-33)
- She's looked at one and then the other, one and then the other -- so many times they don't seem like faces anymore, just brown canvases with strange protrusions, like saying a word so often it ceases to make sense. Magid and Millat. Millat and Magid. Majlit. Milljid. (427)
- But it asks too much of her. It requires her to go back, back, back, to the root, to the fundamental moment when sperm met egg, when egg met sperm -- so early in this history it cannot be traced. Irie's child can never be mapped exactly nor spoken of with any certainty. Some secrets are permanent. In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won't matter anymore because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too torturous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it. (437)
- "Not everybody went to the bloody Oxbridge. Some of us went to the --" -- "University of Life," agrees Archie, nodding, because they were both there, though at different times.
- Samad watches it all and finds himself, to his surprise, unwilling to silence her. Partly because he is tired. Partly because he is old. But mostly because he would do the same, though in a different name. He knows what it is to seek. He knows the dryness. He has felt the thirst you get in a strange land -- horrible, persistent -- the thirst that lasts your whole life.
- Archie'd never seen a man so crumpled, so completely vanquished. It kind of took the wind out of his sails. He was tempted to say You look like how I feel, for if there was an embodiment of his own pounding headache, of the alcoholic nausea rising from his belly, it was standing opposite him now. But neither man spoke; they just stood there for a while, looking at each other across the loaded man. Archie had the funny sensation that he could fold this man instead of killing him. Fold him up and put him in his pocket.
- The doctor's shaking hands tapped his own cigarette inadvertently, and Archie watched the ash fall like gray snow onto his boots__. (444)
- "If neither imperative can be overridden, then choose one, and as you say, get on with it. Man makes himself, after all. And he is responsible for what he makes."
- ...and feels free as Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of paternal strings...
jul 12 2020 ∞
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jul 12 2020 +