В Thicker Than Water, каждое ново открывается шрамом более глубокой связи между людьми. Главные герои — это два близнеца, чья жизнь разбита одной коварной встречей. Начинается с простых моментов и остается неизменным мрачно-сюрреалистическим тоном, привлекающим внимание и заставляющим ждать следующего шага....
Then, as now, bringing someone’s mother into the argument was moving directly to Defcon One: it was the Taunt Unendurable, and it required the Riposte Valiant. Dick-Breath kept his head down, having earned that derisory name for his willingness to do whatever was needed to curry favour with the bigger kids. But Anita was woven out of sturdier as well as more brightly coloured fabric. Mouthing off to her just wasn’t safe, and anybody with less heft than Kenny would have thought twice about doing it.
‘Fuck off, Kenny,’ she shouted, balling her fists.
Kenny smacked her, open-handed, across the face, hard enough to make her stagger.
‘Your mam’s a slag,’ he repeated. ‘She’s knocking off Georgie Lunt.’
Anita screamed and went for him, but Kenny was a head taller than her and he fended her off with a violent shove. ‘So you’re probably a slag too,’ he said. ‘It runs in families. Who are you knocking off, Anita?’"
"For some reason, this was shocking to me. I’d seen boys fight girls before: there was no real room for chivalry in our rough-and-tumble code of ethics, and girls could do you some serious damage if they fought like they meant it.
But I did what I could. I replied to the taunt.
‘Well, your mam killed herself, Kenny,’ I called out. ‘It wasn’t cancer - that’s all my arse. She cut her throat with your dad’s razor.’
There are moments in life when you know you’ve gone too far: you can tell them by the eerie stillness that descends around you - only half a second long in reality, but in subjective time easily long enough for you to think ‘Oh Jesus, I wish I hadn’t done that’ and then start in on the Lord’s Prayer.
