None of This is True

the summer he died.

‘Don’t you ever think, Alix, that everything would be easier if they were dead?’

Because Josie was a child, and he was a grown man, and he may not have looked like a paedophile then, but he looks like one now, and whether he looks like one or not, he was, and he is.

‘Well, yes, that’s half the problem. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve just … lost my way. Or in fact, I’m starting to realise, I never even had a way in the first place.

A life lived in fast-forward and now, apparently, she should peak and crest and then come slowly, contentedly down the other side, but it doesn’t feel as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach

the smell of him – what was it? A sort of solid smell, like cars, like books, like trees.

He’s talking loudly in that way that some people do, as if he thinks everyone in the world wants to hear his business

That once I’d befriended the monster, that was it. For life.’

Pat is actually a raging narcissist, and that no child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed.

She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks.