Claire-Louise Bennett

From Checkout 19

“I’ll say, I’ll say to poor Dale, ‘Look Dale don’t dwell on it, I don’t, I hardly ever think of it’—I think it’s somewhere in him he hated me for saying that because if he had behaved worse than those men he had castigated and tried to keep me away from, if he had done the worst possible thing yet still hadn’t managed to get under my skin, what did that mean, what on earth did that mean exactly? I hadn’t so much absolved him as obliterated him. I should have cried perhaps. I ought to have cried really. He’d witnessed me coming apart in reaction to far less serious misdeeds and contraventions—but there isn’t a fail-safe index for these things is there, that reliably instructs us as to what we will thrust a knife through us and what will be water off a duck’s back? I ought to have cried but it’s too late for that and I am quite monstrous and Dale is lost for words.”