Career of Evil

She had drawn strength from everyone else’s weakness

Her emotions seemed totally out of control. What on earth was wrong with her?

She refused to break down; all that was holding her together was her ability to keep moving forwards, to keep doing the job.

They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgment and lucky breaks. His mother and Elin, both beautiful women, both intelligent, one sucked down into a morass of drugs and human filth, the other sitting high over Regent’s Park behind spotless glass.

“I’m all right, Mum, honestly. I’m working. It’s helping.”

You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.

Out of exhaustion and a feeling of obligation to the family that had been so protective and loving in her time of greatest need she had let a lifelong ambition fall by the wayside, and everyone else had been satisfied to see it go.

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in.

I haven’t got to do anything I don’t want to do anymore.

She felt as though she would like to sleep through the rest of the weekend.