He thought of his old tapes, the ones he’d had for years, the ones he’d used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn’t owning up to them.

The sun snagged on his crooked skin.

Perhaps there comes a time in your life when you lose the ability to command attention, when the world starts to ignore you because it no longer believes you can have much of an effect on it. With.

You have to do normal things or they don’t go away. You have to reassure them. Or they just stand there staring at you, as if you’re a car-crash, or pornography.

There’s love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it – or, if we do, it’s not in the expected way.

It seems to me that part of the true function of a mystery is precisely that it remains unsolved. The world would be far too neat a place if the things that puzzled us were always, eventually, explained. We need unanswered questions at the edges of our lives. In fact, I’d go further. It’s important not to think we can understand everything. Not to understand. The humility that can come from that. The wonder.

It was six hours to Hosannah Beach and he didn't glance at the silver coin that Dad had given him, not even once. All the way he clutched it tight in the palm of his hand and fel the bevelled edge bite into his skin. [...] Waiting in the car while Yvonne unlocked the house, he brought his hand up to his face and opened it. His sweat had the bitter smell of hot metal, hot and bitter, this was what leaving home would always smell like.

You must tell me about it when you do,' she said. 'When you make love for the first time, I mean. I want to know what you think.'He glanced away from her, out of the window. An ice-cream parlour, a man with a dog, a tree. How was he going to get out of shopping next week?'It's so wonderful, it's like,' and she left her mouth open while she thought, and then it came to her, and she smiled, 'it's like colours everywhere.

At first he didn't know where he was, whose voice it was. He must have been asleep. And waking suddenly, like that, you woke in a thousand different places that you'd never been.

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.