Vandalism

Life, love and death, those three cornerstones of the human condition that seem hell-bent on letting you down

‘How’s about a seven-week romance? you asked, and it never crossed my mind to refuse.’

Here, in Glasgow, Moira knows that love is about Andy. The living out of faults and shamefaced flaws together; coming home from work and forgetting to kiss; tossing arbitrary insults around without a care and bothering to clean up the mess afterwards. But while Moira’s best friend, Connie, is dying of breast cancer, Ewan, a man she once loved, reappears on the scene. The reckless intensity of their passion contrasts sharply with her routine life with Andy and, much more brutally, with the rapid deterioration of Connie’s health. Notions of loyalty and betrayal are called into question in a powerful and poignant collision between the present and the past. Within the emotional carnage is a painfully human story of grief and desire, of longing, love and loss.

Opening paragraphs:

Don’t come out till you’ve stopped laughing, were Ewan’s final words.

Don’t come out till you’ve stopped laughing, he said.

I never did stop laughing. But life went on anyway. It always does. The earth can swallow a thousand people in one go while the survivors manage to pick up their belongings and fill their stomachs with warm soup. My loss seemed insignificant in comparison.

It wasn’t as if we’d been in love for long. Seven weeks of looking into each other’s eyes and wishing we could defer the pain of what was to come. But the limited timespan of our romance was its making, not its undoing. No worries about growing grey and tetchy together. Contempt for the familiar was not an option.

The next time I sensed that same urgency was when my closest friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. Both twenty-eight, friends since school, such things didn’t happen to girls like us. We met up in the same bars, smoked the same cigarettes, shared endless complaints about the men who didn’t stick around and the ones we wished had not. Connie was older than me by a whole month and that month now lurked like a gaping hole within her absence.

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