From The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy, which I've just finished
"...that Australian girl got his goat first thing this morning...she'd infuriated Robert no end...looking at the front page of Robert's newspaper, saying how scary she found all this terrorist stuff. Robert told her London had lived with terrorism for years, floods, riots, bombs, the lot. It wasn't news...
'Of course it was terrible for the people actually hurt, the bombs here...But how many did that actually affect? In their day to day life? The families, friends or injured, I grant you, but not everyone, not really. Look, after those bombs up in town, half my bloody customers were in here, carrying on about how it was all different now, but at the end of the same time they were picking up nice clean clothes for a do somewhere, or a job interview, and getting on with it all just the same. If it was true that everything had changed, they wouldn't be haring off for a fancy weekend away, would they? They would have been as changed as they said they were...
'And then you get some kid...going on about someone else's grief as if it's her own, but it isn't. She's stealing other people's grief. Like there's not enough to go around.'
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