Three Score & Ten

One afternoon, I don’t recall how long back, we stopped on our way to activities and sat around in the lobby on the big plastic sofas or outside in the two-o’clock sun while one of the black boys used the phone to call his bookmaker, and Billy’s mother took the opportunity to leave her work and come out from behind her desk and take her boy by the hand and lead him outside to sit near where I was on the grass. She sat stiff there on the grass, tight at the bend with her short round legs out in front of her in stockings, reminding me of the colour of bologna skins, and Billy lay beside her and put his head in her lap and let her tease at his ear with a dandelion fluff. Billy was talking about looking for a wife and going to college someday. His mother tickled him with the fluff and laughed at such foolishness.

‘Sweetheart, you still have scads of time for things like that. Your whole life is ahead of you.’

‘Mother, I’m th-th-thirty-one years old!’

She laughed and twiddled his ear with the weed. ‘Sweetheart, do I look like the mother of a middle-aged man?’

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

To the movies with Lizzyboo Broadener. Lizzyboo: Hope’s big little sister, taller, blonder, rounder faced, fuller figured. Lizzyboo’s breasts are a family joke. Ah, those family jokes. Ah, those secondary sexual characteristics – those SSCs! This is the big question about Lizzyboo’s breasts: where did they come from? No other Broadener, past or present, has got Lizzyboo’s breasts. Hope hasn’t got Lizzyboo’s breasts. She makes do with Hope’s instead, which are a whole lot smaller. It was felt (the family joke continues) that Marmaduke might give Hope’s Lizzyboo’s breasts, or at least make Hope’s bigger. But there’s Marmaduke for you – disobliging to the last. When Marmaduke was done with Hope’s breasts, they were mauled and drained and chewed and tugged all right, but no bigger. A lot sorer – but no bigger. And there’s childless Lizzyboo (thirty-one and just starting to worry) with her beautiful twins. It’s very hot still, and she wears just a sleeveless T-shirt on the way to the flick. The clear lineaments of her embarrassing perfection spread agony on the street. The guys can’t take it. She makes Keiths of us all – or everyone except me, everyone except the man at her side, who doesn’t dare look. The SSCs on her. Will you look at those SCCs.

Martin Amis, London Fields