“His father fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.”

“But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on.”

“My friend Simon managed only sixteen of the seventeen League games - he smashed his head on a bookshelf in London a few hours before the Grimsby game on the 28th of Decemebr; his girlfriend had to take his car keys away from him because he kept making dazed attempts to drive from Fulham up to the Abbey.”

“In the old days, when he flew a lot, he'd never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he'd spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that's what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements, but instead he'd sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.”

“Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.”

“His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.”

“Do you need someone to talk to?" she said gently. "Oh. Thank you. No, no, I'm fine." He touched his face – he'd been crying harder than he'd realized. "You sure? You don't look fine." "No, really. I've just . . . I've just had a very intense emotional experience." He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. "On here." "You're crying about music?" The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert. "Well," said Duncan. "I'm not crying about it. I'm not sure that's the right preposition." She shook her head and walked off.”