I’m such a fan of Hilary Mantel’s writing, so was thrilled to pick up a discounted copy of her story collection at a bookshop recently. There is a marvellous story about two girls who are spying on a strange figure in a wheelchair on a patio:
And we saw – nothing; we saw something not yet become; we saw something, not a face but perhaps, I thought, when I thought about it later, perhaps a negotiating position for a face, perhaps a loosely imagined notion of a face, like God’s when he was trying to form us; we saw a blank we saw a sphere, it was without fea
ture, it was without meaning, and its flesh seemed to run from the bone.
– from ‘Comma’ in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
