There, surrounded by Mort’s collage of flesh, we would shelter between deliveries or when it rained, and the factory would telephone the orders through:
    20 lengths of 1 by ½ flat
    13 lengths of ¾ screw tube
    4 sheets of 5/16th decking
    so forth.
    Some days we sat in the shed all day and not a single order came. I grew bored. Mort didn’t care. He could gaze happily at his masterwork for days on end, whereas I found myself embarrassed. Somehow I couldn’t look at them without staring, which a sense of dignity, and my shyness, and all those years of languid Sunday School lessons, did not permit: instead I had to resort to furtive glances, whenever I was sure that Mort was distracted. Only when Mort was called away and there was no one else around was I able to study these matters more closely. I wondered if women like these actually existed. For sure, I had never seen one.

The Old Curiosity Shop was lost on me. I just did not understand what all the fuss was about. Some little girl who was nice to everybody while they all squirmed about her in their greed and wickedness like a tin of worms—so what? Her life was miserable and she was better off dead. So I thought at the time. It was a book for girls, that was the answer. They liked to cry in movies and so they must have cried secretly when reading books and this was for sure a book to cry into. There can’t be too many copies around without tear stains on the pages.
    But I was a boy and crying was simply not an outcome that an educational institution like Moorabbin Tech prepared you for. To me the book was just dull and uninteresting and it would have been better if Little Nell had been run over by a Hansom Cab after the first chapter and saved us all the trouble of reading the rest.
    Lately, I’ve been tempted to read it again, as an adult, to try and discover what I missed, but I managed to overcome the temptation. Just because I’ve become mature enough to cry if I want to doesn’t mean I should go out of my way to do so. But really, the fear is that I won’t cry this time either.
    Charles Dickens declared that of all of his creations, Little Nell was the one he loved the most. If so, the adage that the more we love the more pain we inflict would stand proven. Look, I’m sorry—it just isn’t my sort of thing, okay?