You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here

‘Did you dunk your head in the dirty bathwater?’ Evelyn says, laughing, and I clasp my sides with laughing too. I haven’t always the confidence to be kind to Maeve in Evelyn’s presence. ‘And did Tom and Mary have the bath before you as well? I’d say they did.’ ‘They did not. I had a fresh bath,’ says Maeve with a shaking voice. We sit there hooting

It’s important when you’ve good news to tell the right people. People who understand the dream or have a dream of their own. Otherwise you end up feeling deflated.

It’s easy to know what life is like for Daddy. Daddy is happiest when he is fixing up a place and putting it in order. Daddy smells like turpentine and he has black and white hair like a sheepdog and when he’s at home he wears white sneakers stained green from mowing the lawn.

‘Maybe if you’re not married by the age of thirty and I’m not married either we could have a pact.’ There’s simply nothing more detrimental to romance than neediness. It’s like the turning off of a mains supply. It shuts the whole thing down.

It often feels as though myself and Evelyn were born friends. We’re always on the edge of things and looking on. It’s as though we’re the only people who’re truly alive, and the people around us aren’t real at all, existing merely for our own amusement.

‘I didn’t really want a race. I only wanted peace and quiet.’ His face is bright and flushed, his tousled thick hair soaked with sweat. ‘I’d prefer it being just the two of us.’ The air around us is changing colour. There are forces at play beneath the surface. There are invisible filaments reaching out from me and sparking with the invisible filam

The door of the church is always open, and we go in and gaze at holy statues, willing them to wink at us. We’re never chosen for apparitions, but it’s for the best; we might get too much of a fright, or we might be given a big job by God to carry out when all we want to do is play. Saint Jude is the saint of hopeless cases, and he stands inside the

It seems my passion for Aidan has been like a flare going off, full of colour and light, but falling from the sky and coming to nothing.

‘All the adults tell us he’s real because they want us to be good,’ she says. ‘But the truth is there’s no one watching. God is only made-up. So you can do whatever you want.’ She’s so casual about it, not forceful at all, that I’m struck with a magnificent terror, the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. If there’s no God, then there’s no