The House Swap Quotes
"The key slides and turns in the lock, smooth and slippery as a silverfish."
"Lying in bed last night, staring at the trembling shadows of the branches grazing against the window and thinking of this moment, I thought it would be harder."
"It’s easy – an anticlimax, even. An eggshell cracked in the hand and tossed aside."
"The door swings open and the pinewood boards of the hallway unfurl ahead, gleamingly polished and clean."
"Welcome! Instructions for all appliances in the green folder in the kitchen."
"The country-style kitchen, oddly out of place in this third-floor city flat."
"I remember the fox I saw crouched by the roadside as I drove past this morning, digging into some unidentifiable corpse."
"This will be like that. Dirty, unpleasant. That’s the way it has to be."
"It's not so bad. The reply is automatic, made before I have had the chance to consider whether or not I mean it."
"It's just a matter of time. I lie there in the dark for a couple of minutes, collecting these thoughts and trying to press them down."
"The past twenty-two months have been ones of regrouping, restabilizing, but they have also been ones of suppression."
"The idea of throwing it all away, of starting over, becomes a kind of siren song."
"Sometimes, the better he is, the more enraged I feel."
"I've come here to have a good time with you. To have fun. Is that too much to ask?"
"You can't have your cake and eat it. Strange expression. It makes no sense, unless you know that, in the past, 'have' was used to mean something more like 'keep'."
"You know I'm around if you need a shoulder to cry on."
"It's another day and a half before I look at the photographs in the hall."
"I stare at her name for a long time. The confident slash of the C, the spatter of ink where the dot of the i has bled across the page."
"I’m sorry. I’m tired of you showing me up, and I’m tired of living like this."
"Sometimes it can be useful not to do anything for a while."
"There’s nothing noble about loving someone. It’s there, or it isn’t."
"Sometimes, I think she’s so precious tears come to my eyes, other times, I can’t actually imagine giving that much of a shit if she died."
"We’re stringing out the joke, but it’s the first evening since we arrived that everything feels so natural."
"We’re good at them. So good that it’s easy to do them without thinking."
"I don’t understand why you would do it this way."
"The sick, compulsive need to look at my phone every five seconds."
"I try to imagine Amber coming in here, swiftly scanning the room for anything of interest."
"I have the feeling of walking a tightrope, delicately balanced, not wanting to move too fast."
"I can’t imagine what could be strong enough to overturn everything that happened the last time I saw you."
"The truth is, I don’t care. All I know is that I need it, and I’m not about to stop."
"I don’t want to lose this, and I don’t want to."
"You wanted to wait, didn’t you? So we’re going to wait."
"If something is alive only in my head, then it’s barely real at all."
"I’m not sure I want to see her and, besides, the less I let the past trickle out into the world, the more I can suppress it."
"Sometimes, like this week, he’s incredibly upbeat and positive, proactive, making an effort. Other times, he’s very distant. Not quite there."
"I love Francis,’ I tell her, ‘but our marriage is – complex.’"
"I know Francis has been attending Narcotics Anonymous with varying degrees of frequency for the past two years, and it shouldn’t surprise me that he wants to go to a meeting."
"I can’t afford to get too distracted yet if I’m going to finish everything on my desk on time."
"There’s something unthinkably decadent about the image, and yet it’s exactly the sort of way I would have spent an idle morning, before Eddie."
"I can feel my heart hammering as I spread out the other sheets on the floor in front of me."
"I shake my head and, with a jolt, I realize I’ve been calculating the figures on my screen wrongly, not concentrating at all."
"I know you couldn’t have done the same. You’ve had to live it, and I have no idea how it might have changed you."
"There is no one steering this ship. In our different ways, we’re both wildly out of our depth."
"We’ve fallen into our own ways of being together, without even trying."
"The sight of it lights a bright flare of anger inside me, white hot and hopeless."
"It’s my own hypocrisy as much as the fear that’s driving the tears."
"It’s good to know that you’ll do it for him, but not for me."
"His mouth opens briefly, then snaps shut, and he leans his head back against the sofa cushions, closing his eyes again."
"Most things take less effort than you think to keep alive."
"I can’t sit stewing over it now. I’ve got visitors to prepare for."
"The thought of climbing into the dark is terrifying, but I set my teeth, telling myself that there is nothing and no one up there."
"Being a few yards away from you is no different from being hundreds of miles away."
"I’ve needed you and the pain of missing you there in my head, to block them out."
"I don’t intend to talk about this to anyone. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to speak to you again."
"This is how completely she’s overwritten the past."
"I’m not sure what the difference is. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m used to hiding things from him."
"Anything seems possible, and as my thoughts churn I’m seized by restlessness."
"It’s only my own thoughts that are scaring me."
"Then nothing. This is it. It's over. It's time to say goodbye and walk away."
"You need to keep completely away from this. From me."
"I think I love you, too. But that's partly why this has to happen."
"I'm looking at the swarming cars and the street, three floors below, and I can feel the force of gravity."
"I’m playing at being someone I’m not and can never be."
"That’s justice. Not the sterile courtroom she evaded, with its inadequate pronouncements and punishments."
"I'm still walking, one foot after the other. The nearest train station is five miles away."
"I don’t want to tell her. That’s your job, if it’s anyone’s."
"It's happened slowly, but now, eleven months in, I can see myself again."
"Take your feelings out to lunch, my sponsor said to me a while ago, and then tell them to fuck off."
"My wedding ring is much too loose now, but I’m still wearing it."
"I’m thinking of the way she often got up in the middle of the night and I’d find her standing in the hallway, staring at nothing."
"If you want to talk, we can. I'm on my way now to the Garden Café on Castle Street. Come if you like."
"I have no idea where we will be in five years, or even five weeks, but I want to live in the present, with my family."
"I'm tired of walking through my own life like a ghost."
"We don’t speak another word for the rest of the journey."