Indonesian Archipelago

　　"Taking the piss out of him wasn't such a good idea, was it?" I said.

　　"He would've done it anyway. Guys like that, they're looking for a fight —— and I just happened to be there, wearing the wrong skin colour and a silly hat."

　　"Yeah, but ——"

　　"Gloria, it's what I do. He has his fists and feet, I have my words —— my devastating wit and, frankly, genius-level intelligence. And you know what? In those few seconds before he hit me, I really, really enjoyed showing him how stupid he was."

　　"Can I say 'yeah, but' again?"

　　"No, you can't. And my final point is, my injuries will heal —— but he's going to remain a stupid, violent, racist bastard for the rest of his life." One or two passers-by glanced at him. Uman pressed the tissue against his nose, which had sprung a fresh leak. He held the tissue for me to see. "Look, the bloodstains have formed the exact pattern of the Indonesian archipelago."

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p235
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Stowaway Time

　　"You don't like escapism?" I said, trying not to laugh.

　　"No. I don't."

　　"So what we have been doing for the last ten days?"

　　"This isn't an escape from reality," Uman said. "This is our reality."

　　Was it? I guessed it was, if we choose it to be. But who gets to choose their own reality, really? An for how long, even if they do? It occurred to me, just then, that we were like small children covering our eyes with our hands and imagining that the other people couldn't see us. Or that the rest of the world would leave us alone.

　　"The real reality is still out there," I said to Uman. "It doesn't go away."

　　"I never said it did," he replied.

　　We returned to an alleyway where we'd stashed our rucksacks behind an industrial-size rubbish bin. They were still there, protected from the rain by their waterproof covers.

　　"Stowaway time?" Uman Said.

　　"Stowaway time."

　　Butterflies in the tummy time. ... ...

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p220-221
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Lives as the River Does

　　"Lives as the river does, never standing still or turning back but forever flowing onwards. If you should reach a dessert, transform yourself into cloud and float across it, then fall as rain on the other side to become a river once more." He shrugged. "It's an old Arabic proverb."

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p167
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Magical

　　I woke early. Phoneless, I had no idea what time it was, but when I unzipped the flap carefully, so as not to wake Uman, and poked my head out, a smoky just-after-dawn light seeped through the woods, turning the trees into charcoal sketches. All was quiet, except for the songs of unseen birds. Tired and just-woken grump as I was, the effect was calming.

　　A movement caught my eye. A few metres away, a family of rabbits loped about the clearing: two adults, browsing, and four young, play-fighting. I held my breath, kept dead still. For a moment, they carried on, oblivious to my presence, then one of the adults spotted me and all six scampered into the bracken, vanishing so quickly and so totally that I might've imagined them. Thirty seconds, a minute? But those rabbit were the most magical thing I'd ever seen.

　　I waited in the opening of the tent in the hope they'd come back. They didn't.

　　Never mind. I was still smiling inside at the sight of them. At how beautiful the woods looked, now that the darkness had been erased by the breaking of a new day.

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p139-140
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Strength of Character

　　"You don't like me very much, do you?"

　　Mum chips in. "Can you blame her, the way you're acting? You might think you're all grown up now, but——" Uman asked.

　　"Look, we're all getting a bit tired and tetchy," R.I. Ryan says. "Shall we call a time-out?"

　　I tell her that sounds like a brilliant idea.

　　"And, Gloria. It's not a matter of liking or disliking. I'm just trying to establish the facts and sometimes that means asking you to talk about things you'd rather not." She pauses. "As it happens, though, I do like you. I wish I'd your strength of character when I was fifteen."

　　I try to imagine what she was like when she was my age.

　　I can't, though. Any more than I could look at a picture of myself when I was a baby and find signs of the girl I have become.

　　Strength of character. Is that what I have? Uman thought so, and so does D.I. Ryan. But they've only seen what happens on the surface —— the things I do, the things I say —— and that's not where your character is. Uman knew me —— knows me —— better than anyone ever has, but even he never set foot inside my head or heart. Never thought my thoughts or felt what i felt.

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p114-115
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Rules

　　We talked about rules; how you decided which ones to obey and which to break. It was like a class discussion in Citizenship ... only, it was nothing like a class discussion in Citizenship.

　　"Are you a rule breaker?" Uman asked.

　　"In my head I am, yeah."

　　"But not in practice."

　　"No. Not often, anyway. And nothing on your scale."

　　"Why is that, d'you think?"

　　"Don't know. Fear, probably. Fear of getting in trouble."

　　"And fear of standing out?" Uman suggested. "Fear of not fitting in?"

　　"Yeah, that too. As I've got older, I've become less daring. I guess."

　　He coughed. Just the once. "My father used to have a poster on the wall of his study —— a cartoon showing rows and rows of identical grey houses with identical grey roofs, with just one house in the middle with a roof painted in pink-and-purple stripes. Outside, the owner —— he's holding a paint pot and brush —— is being frogmarched down the street by the police." Another cough. It took Uman a moment to catch his breath. "As soon as I was old enough to understand that cartoon," he said. "I swore I would grow up to be a guy with a pink-and-purple roof."

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p70-71
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Started with an Appearance

Where is he? It's all I can think about. Every minute since it ended.


D.I. Ryan wants to hear it from the beginning. The first of the fifteen days, I presume she means; the day I went missing. It started a couple of weeks before then, though.

　　It started with an appearance, not a disappearance.

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p16
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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