(no subject)
When Lawrence was out of town, the flat seemed to generate an echo. She would not, any longer, understand why she was here, in both the general sense of alive, and the specific sense of on a Georgian square just south of London Bridge. Many were the solitary evenings that she might have worked late in her studio, but the opportunity would be wasted. She would walk from room to room. Pour a glass of wine and leave it standing. Drizzle the stainless-steel drain board with corrosive to remove the lime scale. (So mineral was London's tap water -reputed to have cycled through more human bodies than any liquid on the planet, and leaving a white, crusty ghost behind every evaporated drop -that it might have stood sheerly upright on the counter like the Cliffs of Dover without a glass.) But suddenly the energy required to wipe the glop away would elude her. She would go to bed, and wake to a reek in the kitchen from the chemicals left to seethe.
Lionel Shriver: The Post-Birthday World
Lionel Shriver: The Post-Birthday World