40 by Various

Author:Various
Language: eng
Format: epub

First lines of the forty best-selling Canongate books of all time. See here for more details.

At Forty

Your hairdresser will become a close friend. My hairdresser will be me. Our siblings will exist once per fortnight, in chain pubs on dual carriageways. Conversations will shrink. A hedgehog’s heart beats three hundred times a minute, Mum cries at soaps now, the dog is dying. After arguments, you will sleep with your ankles at my ears. We will discuss the possibility of scuba diving and never go scuba diving. Our weekends will consist of entire crime drama seasons, circles of chorizo, and alternating foot rubs. Our first child will thoroughly research and firmly believe in conspiracy theories regarding Princess Diana and humanoid reptiles. Our second child will eat lip balm. The family dynamic will be ‘mostly calm, with patches of light drizzle and the possibility of hurricane-force winds’. Your mum will die and my mum will die. We will be awake late one night and find our second child eating toothpaste on the patio, quietly talking to the moon, dancing jerkily as though hypnotized. We will not know how to respond. As a family, we will holiday in America. Our first child will punch a dolphin at SeaWorld and claim self-defence. We will sigh. We will take it in turns to gain weight, lose friends, and quit smoking. You will be thirty-nine until the birthday when you tear up and drive, alone, to Alton Towers, to ride the same rollercoaster over and over. We will shrug. Strangers will stay strangers. Our bodies will begin to melt.

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