Milkman

With me too, he was uncalculated, transparent, free from deception, always was what he was, with none of that coolness, that withholding, that design, those hurtful, sometimes clever, always mean, manipulations.

that I came to understand how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man.

Just as most people here chose not to say what they meant in order to protect themselves, they could also, at certain moments when they knew their mind was being read, learn to present their topmost mental level to those who were reading it whilst in the undergrowth of their consciousness, inform themselves privately of what their true thinking was

They were though, having an impact, as were the differences I’d also started to perceive in the district’s attitude towards myself.

felt him behind me before I felt the hands upon me. It was third brother, my third brother, whom I hadn’t seen in a year. Hardly

But it was a game – more toy soldiers on toy battlefields, more toy trains in the attic, hard men in their teens, hard men in their twenties, hard men in their thirties, in their forties, with the mentality being toys even if it was far from toys these men were playing with.

And now, quite suddenly, I felt sad.

aberrational

‘Us’ and ‘them’ was second nature: convenient, familiar, insider, and these words were off-the-cuff, without the strain of having to remember and grapple with massaged phrases or diplomatically correct niceties.