Will wondered whether Marcus had ever sat in his room listening to Nevermind in the same way that Will had sat in his room listening to the first Clash album. He couldn’t imagine that he had. Marcus couldn’t possibly have understood that kind of rage and pain, even though he probably had his own version of those feelings swilling around in there somewhere.

— Мам, а ты хотела выйти замуж?
— Не очень. Мне казалось, что это неважно.
— А почему тогда другие женятся?
— Ну, по разным причинам. Для того чтобы чувствовать себя защищенными. Из-за давления со стороны семьи. Из-за ложных представлений о романтических отношениях.

-Потому что.... для большинства из нас смысл заключается в работе, детях, семье и так далее. А у тебя ничего этого нет. Ничто не ограждает тебя от безысходности, но ты не кажешься человеком, страдающим от нее.

-Господи, какой же вы все-таки эгоист!
-А я живу сам по себе.Один. Я не ставлю свои интересы выше чьих-то, потому, что , кроме меня, никого больше и нет.

— Маркус, такова жизнь. Ты должен определить для себя, во что веришь, и потом следовать этому. Это трудно, а не «нечестно».

— Как ты можешь говорить, что я не забочусь о тебе?
— Потому что так оно и есть. Ты просто готовишь мне еду, а это я и сам могу. Всё остальное время ты только плачешь. Это... это плохо. Это плохо для меня.

признаться, самым привлекательным в ней он находил то, что она пыталась покончить с собой.

Казалось, этот мальчишка не просит ни о чем на свете и в то же время так во многом нуждается.

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were at in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself, and therefore spending three days bombed out of your head on your own said things about you that you might not want saying.

Will got a bit… fed up sometimes, but he couldn’t pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn’t even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?

Why did these people want to make things so hard for themselves? It was easy, life, easy-peasy, a matter of simple arithmetic: loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favour, but they quite clearly weren’t. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn’t worth the risk?

In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.

‘This is the last straw, though,’ Katrina said.
‘Ditto,’ said Fiona.
‘Until the next last straw, anyway.’
They both laughed, but it was true, Will thought. There would always be one more last straw.

‘In the end, "I dunno" is the only honest answer anyone can give, isn’t it? Because I dunno either, and I’d be kidding myself, and you, if I pretended any different.’

The shoes were displayed according to manufacturer, and the Adidas section of the shop was attracting more than its fair share of shoppers.
‘Sheep,’ said Marcus as they were approaching. ‘Baaaa.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘That’s what my mum says when she thinks people haven’t got a mind of their own.’

This wasn’t right. He was only a kid. He’d been thinking that more and more recently, as he got older and older. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because, when he really was only a kid, he wasn’t capable of recognizing it—you had to be a certain age before you realized that you were actually quite young.