Because if things did happen simultaneously it'd be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of the text have been overprinted, like each page is actually two pages but with one superimposed on the other to make it unreadable. Because it's New Year not May, and it's England not Italy, and it's pouring with rain outside and regardless of the hum (the hummin') of the rain you can still hear people's stupid New Year firewords going off and off and off like a small war, because people are standing out in the pouring rain, rain pelting into their champagne glasses, their upturned faces watching their own (sadly) innadequate fireworks light up then go black.引自第10页
...how can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can the world be this vulgar?
How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?
She didn't say it out loud, though, because there wasn’t a point.
It isn’t about saying.
It is about the hole which will form in the roof, through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.引自第15页
Every day before work George's mother, when she was alive (because she can’t exactly do it now being, you know, dead), used to do a keep-fit set of stretches and exercises. At the end of this she would always do a dance round the living room for the length of a song on a playlist on her phone.
She'd started doing this a couple of years ago. Every day she put up with everybody laughing at her doing her moves among the furniture, her headphones bigger than her ears.
Every single day, George has decided, from its first day onwards for this first year in which her mother won’t be alive, she will not just wear something black somewhere on her person, but she will do the sixities dance for her in her honour. This is only problematic in that George will have to listen to songs while she does it, and that listening to songs is one of the things she can no longer do without inducing a kind of sadness that actually hurts in the chest.引自第21页
At midnight on all the other New Years her mother would usually get out some really nice paper, the kind with real bits of flower petal mixed in with its texture, and give her and her father two pieces each. They would each (except Henry, asleep, which was important, fire being involved) write their wishes and hopes for the new year on to one of them and write the things they'd hated most about the old year on to the other one. Then - being very very careful not to mix the pieces up - each person would take a turn standing over the sink, strike a match, hold the flame on to a corner of the piece of paper with all the things written on it that he or she didn't liked, and watch it burn. Then when you couldn't hold it any more without hurting yourself you could drop it safely into the sink (this letting-go of it was the whole point of the ritual, her mother always said) where, when it finished burning, you would wash the burnt-up bits away.引自第27页
Could she see? Was she really blind? George was intrigued. Was it real? Or was the woman just acting? And if she was blind, had been blinded by whatever the older woman squeezed into her eyes, how long did it take before it wore off and she could see again? Or could she never see again? Maybe she was somewhere in the world right now still wandering about blind. Maybe they'd told her it would wear off, and it never did, or only partially did. Maybe something about those eye drops changed something about the way she saw. Or, on the other hand, maybe she was perfectly fine and had 20:20 vision regardless. 引自第33页
George goes downstairs and makes a single slice of toast. She knifes over it with quick thick butter then puts the butter knife straight into the jam without washing it because no one will even notice. She does it precisely because no one will, because she can leave dregs of butter in whatever jam she likes for the rest of her life now.引自第45页
Art makes things happen the way that something happens. (That's the wording of one of her mother's most retweeted Subverts.) Obviously. But this is a family game. They've played this game for years. It is one of her father's games, he plays it to make her and her brother laugh whenever her mother takes them all to a gallery. He pretends to be a slightly mentally challenged person. He pretends it so well that sometimes people inn the galleries turn and look at him, or look away in case he really might be mentally challenged.引自第46页
Now, in the palazzo, when George says the supposed-to-be-funny thing about what's the point of art, Henry says, as if he thinks she means it too,
It's really pretty.
Henry is gay. He must be. Though it's true, this is a really pretty room. 引自第48页
...
Though it is embarrasing and excruciatinng when someone won't play your game George gets over herself. She slips into her real self again. 引自第48页
She goes back to the good wall.
It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. They're all also happening in their own terms. The picture makes you look at both - the close-up happenings and the big picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing to show how ordinary cruelty really is.引自第53页
I’ve never seen anything like it, her mother says. It’s so warm it’s almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I’ve never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It’s never sentimental. It’s generous, but it’s sardonic too. And whenever it’s sardonic, a moment later it’s generous again.引自第54页
