Cutting remarks

Usage examples of barbs.

But will Kate find the will-power to become her own woman, the woman Barbs knows she can be.

Her arms felt heavy with the weight of Barbs, her thoughts were fragmenting as they had done since the day, ten days ago, when she had 'slipped away'.

On her way to the car she looked through the gap in the leylandii to Penny and Tom's 'Kosher' vicarage, as Barbs had christened it.

She was somewhere else, locked into Barbs's last breath, and it was the third time Jan had pounced, and as she wrote Kate wanted to scream at herself, at Jan and her gimlet eyes, her meticulously made up youthful face.

Because she wasn't coping, her mind was too full, and as she wrote she cursed the whole damn medical profession, who been able to do nothing to help Barbs, who had done nothing to stop what had finally happened.

Black is so much more slimming, though Barbs, of course, would have gone right to the top, just for the colour.

It wasn't the principle that Barbs objected to, it was the 'sensible' bungalow.

Peter, though, had a habit of pushing things through, almost without anyone realising, but perhaps it was inevitable, given the nature of his job, Kate had said, anxious to calm Barbs.

Besides, Barbs had pretty soon left her mutterings behind and gone forward.

It was Peter who must have closed Barbs's curtains, but his mother hated darkness.

In the dining area Penny was pouring gin into Barbs's crystal tumblers.

The old man had done it himself without Barbs ever knowing, so Peter could too.

In fact he still suspected it was his mother who had encouraged her, because the two women had become far too close once Barbs became really laid up.

As always Barbs had drawn parallels with her own life, pointing out the insidious chipping away at self-esteem which went unnoticed by the recipient, the repression of emotion, until something happened to reveal the toxic situation in all its glory.

He had dared to criticise his mother to Barbs, and it was then that she explained the circumstances of his birth.