On Tender

Belinda McKeon, Tender

- In school she had been able to learn reams of stuff off by heart, and to thorw it down on paper...In collage, they expected you to use your mind. Did she even have a mind...To discover that, actually, what you'd had all this time, been praised for all this time - what had got you off the hook all this time - was not, after all, intelligence, but a shallow robotic skill. -

- She was still not quite able to believe that this happened, but it did. You said something, sounding confident as you said it, keeping your voice level, and people nodded, and people agreed with you, and people looked at you as a person who apparently knew their stuff. That was it. -

- Then they were home and he was himself again. Or his public self, or his social self; Catherine was beginning to have trouble remembering all of his selves. -

- 'He certainly struck lucky with his timing,' Julia said drily, eyeing the photograph in the front of them. 'Any other week of the year, this stuff would look exactly like the forced, stretching pedanticism it is. But the jammy bastard's opening night turns out to be the night of the peace talks deadline, and so here we find ourselves, bang in the middle of the most blazingly relevant cultural phenomenon of the year.' -

- Was a reality something you arrived at, or something you made?
Or something you just forced onto things? -