Patrick McGrath

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me.To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness.

Isolated people, those who live alone, are always conscious of their condition in the homes of families.

Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.

Soon enough the tears came but of course nobody came down to see if she was all right, it was just the slut in the kitchen who'd ruined their lives, getting drunk of neat gin and howling for her lost lunatic offer.

Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation.

We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.

For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation followed by public self-display, and the associated risk of rejection all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with their sexual partners. Then, when disillusion occurs, as of course it must, the sense of betrayal is profound...

Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness?

A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.