The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by The Friday Project in 2015
Copyright © Dan Richards 2015
Cover Layout Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Cover by Stanley Donwood
Dan Richards asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008105211
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780008105228 Version: 2015-09-11
For Jo
Many are prepared to suffer for their art. Few are prepared to learn to draw.
– Simon Munnery
CONTENTS
The Butcher of Common Sense Footnotes
In the summer of 2006 I moved to Norwich from my family home in Bristol to begin a Creative Writing MA at the Art School.
It was a year since I’d graduated from an English Literature and Philosophy BA at the University of East Anglia. I had spent the intervening months working in a bookshop staffed entirely by graduates sheltering from an indifferent world, presided over by a weirdly ageless Brylcreemed man who, when he wasn’t smoking on the roof – arcing his dog-ends languidly into the yard of the adjacent church – would lock himself in his attic office or materialise at your elbow to relate how his father nursed the captive Rudolf Hess.
The shop had a very limited selection of Art books and an even meaner smattering of Photography and Transport.* There was no demand, we were told, and it was this message that we passed on to any customer who enquired, taking great pleasure in directing them up to the ‘better stocked, less expensive shop’ at the top of the road (‘where we would much prefer to work’).
I had no idea what I was doing at the shop but day after day I’d be there, going through the motions of retail. I’d reached an impasse. It was relatively easy work and brought in a small wage, which I’d eke out during the week so I could catch a train to the South Coast to see my girlfriend at weekends. Sometimes I’d get to Brighton and she’d be happy to see me. Sometimes not. Sometimes she’d say, ‘I’m not sure how I feel about you being here … turning up like this …’ and I’d freeze there on the doorstep; tired and punctured, foolish – as if I’d spoilt the most simple of tasks: just turn up and don’t be shit.
Life in Barcelona-on-Sea unravelled as a mess of well-meant gestures and hissed upset. I was sure we had it in us to be happy but we weren’t; we really weren’t.
This went on for months.
I’d think about us all the week while stickering 3 for 2s