Really quite beautiful. I found myself drawing out my reading time for this book, and almost wanting to find a tree to sit under and slowly soak up this story.
It's a story of love, loss and loneliness (or so I read), and it's was beautifully paced dropping back and forth from different points in time for the two main characters. Describing emotions and the tiniest moments in such a loving and tender way. It truly made me want to slow down and just watch the love that moves around us every day.
I want to give this a 4.5 but the stars apparently must be whole or not at all. I just found the ending a little abrupt. But that may have also been confused by the fact that the last 6% (10-ish minutes) of the book was an interview with the author (which was interesting enough), it just threw me when the tale was finished.
All the same, quite beautiful.
20 Highlight(s)
Garvy died a year after retiring. This place had been his oxygen. They reckoned he suffocated doing nothing.
He wasn't sure what the bottle of whisky was doing next to his bed. It was that fairy again, he thought.
It's a lovely thought, though, isn't it? Some people say it's not true but I like to think it is. Painting flowers as a sign of friendship and welcome. Men and boys should be capable of beautiful things.
how he clung to her every word as if they were handholds up a cliff face.
They watched the shifting colours of the sun and the deep shadows eavesdropped on their grief,
Her name on the stone still drew disbelief and sadness.
every month or so, bright wreaths would adorn new graves and he would acknowledge the grieving. A reminder that he and they were not alone.
Enough now. He kissed her hand. Enough, he said. OK, she said, and buttoned up his shirt. But can I rest my hand here, is that OK? That's OK, he said, and he fell asleep with her hand on his chest and with tears spilling from the corners of his eyes.
Because everything she held on to and everything she believed in came together in that unexpected moment. The simple belief that men and boys were capable of beautiful things.
And he didn't push the thought away as he usually did, but he stayed with it, listened to it because it couldn't hurt him today, not there.
That was the world he inhabited between the time of it happening and the time of him knowing. A brief window, not yet shattered, when music still stirred, when beer still tasted good, when dreams could still be hatched at the sight of a plane careering across a perfect summer sky.
Ellis held it up to his nose and didn't know what to expect, the only smell was a faint trace of washing powder lifting the must.
A doctor suggested I write to make sense of the world around me. There is no sense, I said, abruptly.
He made me calm. Made me learn the names of paints, and I told him that Scarlet Lake and Rose Madder would be our drag queen names, should circumstance ever force us on to the stage.
You'll get fat, he says. I am fat, and I lift up my jumper. This wasn't here yesterday, I say. This is trespassing.
I felt as if nothing else had previously existed. As if the colours and smells of this new country eradicated memory, as if every day rolled back to Day One, bringing with it the chance to experience it all again.
I know, I said. I know. I'd already accepted I wasn't the key to unlock him. She'd come later.
And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.
In those days of my twenties and early thirties, I remember how friendships came and went. I was too critical – a disagreement over a film or politics gave me permission to retreat. Nobody matched Ellis and Annie, and so I convinced myself I needed nobody but them. I was a sailboat at heed to the breeze, circling buoys before heading out to the uncomplicated silence of a calm bay.
Only when Ellis is alone does the fear of his father return. It is a fear that extinguishes all he is and affirms the belief that he is unworthy of happiness and is incapable of making a success of his life. This shame precedes the shame of sexuality.