I’ll Buy You a New One
“He said it so simply that heat flared inside Simon where the cold had been.” “Don’t touch it. It’s mine.” Jacob wrenches the handlebar away — the grip strips the skin from Simon’s palm — and with one movement throws the bicycle into the ditch. “My father will kill me over the bike!” — “I’ll buy you a new one.” He said it so simply that “heat flared inside Simon where the cold had been.” The bicycle was the one thing that made it possible not to get into that car; it has been destroyed, and he has been offered money in its place.
Two mechanisms are at work here at once. The first is an attack on a means of independence: a controlling partner almost always begins by making the other dependent on him — for transport, for money, for a roof. The second is class blindness, not malicious, but no less destructive for that: for Jacob, “I’ll buy you a new one” closes the question; for Simon, it means a conversation with a drunk father and one more debt to the person he is trying to leave. “You don’t understand anything” — literally. And he will not understand — until the chapter where he first sees the peeling façade.
