Free The Blue Book by A. L Kennedy Page A

said.
    This can feel ugly and uncomfortable to you, alien – because you have integrity, and dishonesty doesn’t suit you, how could it? But nobody is fastidious all the time, unremittingly brave: you can be scared off to this or that edge of the truth – like anyone. And if, for example, you did in actuality do some unfortunate thing and it was completely unlike you – the word, the thought, the act, the total mistake – if it was so far from who you are that describing it, admitting it, would be misleading – then a deception might be called for, a silence might be justified.
    And what if you’re simply finding a way of practising your dreams, letting them play, sharing? What if you’re pronouncing incantations, inventing happy prophecies? That surely must be pure and harmless. The friends, the relatives, the loves, the ones who know you: they can see through to your heart no matter what you tell them, so your fantasies can be something they’ll enjoy – secrets that join you closer to them, enlarge their definitions of who you are – a person’s choice of lies being dependably diagnostic.
    Not lies, though – that’s too harsh a term. When you thoroughly study yourself, you know that you’re better than that, than a liar. You’ve only avoided being truthful, pedantic, when it would hurt somebody – somebody including yourself – and self-defence is nothing shaming.
    It’s an indication of your moral sensitivity that you do sometimes feel ashamed.
    You have in the course of your entire life occasionally erred, drifted, been too instinctive. You admit that.
    And not everyone would admit that.
    Also, there were days when you said the true thing even though it would hurt. You withstood the injury. You could make yourself admired for that, but instead you don’t talk about it. There are several things – when you reflect – that you don’t talk about and it’s significant that the very good aren’t mentioned any more than the very bad. They can both unnerve you.
    You tend to give others your middle ground. Which is prudent. Human beings are not intended to be comprehensive in their expression of themselves. If they were, they would be terrifying. They would always mean too much.
    There would be layers revealing layers and meanings that double and on and on and where would it end?
    It would end in a room.
    It would end with a man standing in a doorway and walking back into a room.
    It would end with this room.
    He’s in this room.
    The man is in this room.
    In another hired-for-the-evening stuffy little room – stage at the far wall, away from the door, and the rows of stackable seating set out neatly with an aisle – a shuttered hatch to one side that will roll up and open through to the tiny kitchen where someone will make the tea and coffee, serve up biscuits in the interval.
    And every room will never be anything but stuffy – what the man does perhaps affecting the atmosphere’s density, he can’t be sure – and the biscuits will never be anything but stale – snack density not down to him: it’s because they buy cheap biscuits – no matter who or where they are, they go in for own-brand, nasty biscuits and ignore the sell-by dates, don’t bother to store them in a tin, which shows a breathtaking lack of foresight. Tight-fisted town after town and in every venue the fund-raising raffle to open the evening and the prizes of unconvincing electrical goods, or personal readings at later dates, free healings, the sending of amplified prayers on the winner’s behalf.
    And the man is there with her – with the woman, with his love – and they are there together and smiling where no one can see it, giggling just beneath the skin. They are being the secret of who they are, one with the other, and everything of them that’s important is tucked out of sight. The man and the