Your Place And Mine - A Tragic Story
Nicci French’s story, for Penguin’s We Tell Stories, ‘Your Place and Mine‘ is terribly tragic and haunting. I wonder how many of us have played both protagonists in our own lives - one who trivializes the relationship with another after eating the tohfu using justifications like past hurt, present company, future pain and the other who expects too much because of the construction of a narrative to understand what is happening with the hopes of what is desired to be.
About the end of relationships and moving on:
You ought to be able to bring it to a finish, draw a line under it and move on but instead, well, in my experience, it’s dribbled away in a mess of dirty looks and snappy little arguments and awful silences on the phone, daring each other to hang up, nasty confrontations on the street.
Until the relationship just collapses like a building that’s had woodworm and rotted away and had the roof tiles nicked and the windows smashed and been infested by rats and things behind the walls that you’re not quite sure what they are, and then one morning you walk past it and it’s just fallen over.
About anticipating the start of a (beautiful) relationship:
Going to work suddenly became exciting. Each morning I would get up a bit earlier than usual and take ages getting ready: I’d have a shower and wax my legs and rub my favourite body lotion all over me. I’d choose my clothes carefully, from knickers outwards. I’ve even gone out and blown money on new shoes and a dress that I’ve had my eye on for ages but I didn’t think I could afford.
From the moment I met him, I felt that I knew him - recognised him - but at the same time I don’t know anything about him and it’s that gap that makes my heart miss a beat because bit by bit it will get filled in.
I make them up, when I’m in bed at night and thinking of him. I tell myself he reads novels and plays tennis and likes the same music as I do. I make up sisters and brothers and friends for him. A love life.
And if I must add, sprinkle myself in as a character in that life, present and future.
Many more beautiful prose that could be pasted here, but these are the ones that resonated with me the most.
On a side note - these two writers have given away something beautiful for free, and guess what, it makes me want to actually buy their books. Wouldn’t have known about them otherwise.
It is true. Piracy isn’t the problem. Obscurity is.
