She Was Reaching The Limits Of How

Occasionally, Very Occasionally, Say At Four O’clock In The Afternoon On A Wet Sunday, She Feels Panic-stricken And Almost Breathless With Loneliness. Once Or Twice She Has Been Known To Pick Up The Phone To Check That It Isn’t Broken. Sometimes She Thinks How Nice It Would Be To Be Woken By A Call In The Night: ‘get In A Taxi Now’ Or ‘i Need To See You, We Need To Talk’. But At The Best Of Times She Feels Like A Character In A Muriel Spark Novel – Independent, Bookish, Sharp-minded, Secretly Romantic.

Emma Was A Shocking Driver, Simultaneously Sloppy And Petrified, And For The First Fifty Miles Had Been Absent-mindedly Driving With Her Spectacles On Top Of Her Contact Lenses So That Other Traffic Loomed Menacingly Out Of Nowhere Like Alien Space Cruisers.

Dexter, I Love You So Much. So, So Much, And I Probably Always Will. I Just Don't Like You Anymore. I'm Sorry.

And They Did Have Fun, Though It Was Of Different Kind Now. All That Yearning And Passion Had Been Replaced By A Steady Pulse Of Pleasure And Satisfaction And Occasional Irritation, And This Seemed To Be A Happy Exchange; If There Had Been Moments In Her Life When She Had Been More Elated, There Had Never Been A Time When Things Had Been More Constant.

For The Best Part Of My Childhood I Visited The Local Library Three Or Four Times A Week, Hunching In The Stacks On A Foam Rubber Stool And Devouring Children's Fiction, Classics, Salacious Thrillers, Horror And Sci-fi, Books About Cinema And Origami And Natural History, To The Point Where My Parents Encouraged Me To Read A Little Less.