Dirt Music

Jim wanted to fish but he wanted his sons to do something else. He didn't want them to follow the standard White Point trajectory which meant bumping out of school at fifteen to end up in seaboots or prison greens.

Another man, an American, had once told her in a high, laughing moment his theory of love. It was magic, he said. "The magic ain't real, darlin, but when it's gone it's over."

Georgie didn't want to believe in such thin stuff, that all devotion was fuelled by delusion, that you needed some spurious myth to keep you going in love or work or service. Yet she'd felt romance evaporate often enough to make her wonder.