From Chapter 3 The Shack by the Sea
The sea was all aglitter now, surfers floating about like bowling pins near the break. It was a shame about George’s career, though Perrin had never asked him how he felt about it. He would either have feigned indifference or really been indifferent, and it would have been hard to tell the two apart. From her own experience in art school, she guessed that her father simply preferred the company of artists and his young wife, to working. It was easier to tune into the muses in the shack by the sea, smoke pot and talk about art, than to create it. Before Perrin was born it was Iris who finally convinced him to cut out the hard booze and drink only wine, because he got too wild. It was as if they and their contemporaries were attuned to failure. Their group were supportive of each other, and kind in their criticism of each other—it was agreed that everyone was doing good work. But by the time the seventies drew to a close, they were in a state of gentle decline, attuned to their own ruin, almost relishing it, the wind off the sea whistling on the roof of the shack, and rattling its windows. They had a sense of themselves as authentic, and perhaps they really were. George was at his best then, erudite and earthy, and Iris was funny and counter cultural, even if the culture at that moment had still, by a hair, been favorable to them.
From Chapter 7 Waterloo Bridge at Sunset, Pink Effect
In the corner of his eye, he saw the blue van pull away from the curb, not in a rush at all. He would never have recalled its slow progress were it not for what happened after it reached the corner and slunk through a red light. A force knocked him to his knees; red and hot-orange with jagged spikes went through him. His untucked T-shirt billowed out from below. He was enveloped in a gray and white cloud and deafened but for a piercing high tone, while pieces of their van hit the pavement in chunks. Around him tissues and cups, newspapers and Styrofoam food containers blew about drunkenly. Shouts and screams sounded far away, then close, then far away again. The screeching went on, both inside his head and all around. His knees thundered with pain. Sirens poked through—an ambulance, the police. He slumped over on his side, the world askew. The pain worked through him, demanding his attention, focusing him, gathering into his left thigh. He felt there and found his hand wet and slippery. For a moment he wondered if he might roll down the pavement because it was no longer flat under him. He felt terribly alone. He was a bug, pinned to an angled then completely vertical surface. He tumbled into a wall of black and was cast out into space.
Outtake that didn’t make it into the book, but is evocative of the mood of Woman with Eyes Closed
About the “real” locals, Perrin’s mother Iris used to say, ‘We’re not us and we’re not them.’ Perrin often remembered those words, it helped her with the later confusion of her home town being invaded by, it seemed, the entire world. It was her hometown after all. Though the family seed was put down only in the forties, if she wasn’t from the East End, where was she from? As she grew up she found it was a pedigree of a kind to be able to say that you were here when the beach was mostly empty on a Wednesday in July, or the nearby general store was little visited, shelves scantily stocked with animal crackers and index cards that sat untouched for years. It was a magical thing to have had a casual relationship with staggering beauty, to have biked down roads with no cars under a saffron and rose sun, and to have gone to school with farm kids who were brought up to be neighbors to each other for life. To have heard a five o’clock ocean thwack from an old shed in the dunes.