Girl Meets Boy

I began to feel bad about what I’d said. I felt bad as soon as it came out of my mouth. Words. Look what they can do.

Your grandfather likes to think that all the stories in the world are his to tell, she says.

She kept on getting away with it. She kept on setting fire to the empty buildings.

became a fully fledged grown-up – which is what’s supposed to happen on the day you’re twenty-one – she looked in the mirror and said to herself, I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to change things. So she went straight out and broke a window as a birthday present to herself.

She can look at the boys if she wants; she can go round the screen and look at the girls. She can go between the two sides of things like a magician, or a joke. The audience always laughs with delight when she does it.

and nothing lasts, and nothing’s lost,

we stood on the bank of the river under the trees, the pair of us, and we promised the nothing that was there, the nothing that made us, the nothing that was listening, that we truly desired to go beyond our selves

Your grandfather likes to think that all the stories in the world are his to tell, she says.
Just the important ones, our grandfather says. Just the ones that need the telling. Some stories always need telling more than others

Then I wondered why on earth would anyone ever stand in the world as if standing in the cornucopic middle of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but inside a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all round her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting?

The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.