I Am Sovereign

NICOLA BARKER

I Am Sovereign

Contents

About the Author

Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018.

Also by Nicola Barker

Novels

Reversed Forecast

Small Holdings

Wide Open

Five Miles from Outer Hope

Behindlings

Clear

Darkmans

Burley Cross Postbox Theft

The Yips

In the Approaches

The Cauliflower®

H(A)PPY

Short Story Collections

Love Your Enemies

Heading Inland

For Patrick Hargadon
and his trademark luminously bright white socks

Where is the life we have lost in living?

T.S. Eliot

1.

GO, LOCAL SPORTS TEAM, GO!

Charles can’t get started. He has written an email to the help-desk at Silencing the Inner Critic telling Richard Grannon that he can’t get started and wondering if there’s anything in particular that he can do to rectify this parlous situation. He honestly doesn’t know why he can’t get started. When he thinks about how angry he is with himself (because of how he can’t get started) he begins to flashback and remember how his dad always used to say that he was a pathetic piece of crap who would never amount to anything. Next he feels this unbearable ‘constricted feeling’ in his chest, and, in exquisite conjunction with that unbearable constriction – like a cowboy cantering along, determinedly, beside a demented heifer – an equivalently overwhelming urge to go online and surf the algorithms and buy a book or – better still – an audio book called something like: Living Your Unlived Life.

He imagines listening to this audiobook at night on his laptop while he’s sleeping – or on his nifty, brand-new, clean-white, kinda-space-cube-y, wall-mounted CD player (if he can burn a CD on his brand-new-as-yet-unboxed CD burner) which seems to have no automatic stop mechanism (the reviewers on Amazon were definitely niggled/bemused by this) so is essentially permanently on repeat – and … and … yes, and the positive messages will seep gently and painlessly into his unconscious mind … or … or his conscious mind (more likely), when he’s not managing to sleep, because he actually cannot sleep, because he is so frustrated by the fact that he can’t get started and he truly fucking hates himself. He fucking hates himself for this blatant sign of his manifold cowardice and impotence and ineffectualness and weakness.

Just. Can’t. Get. Started.

Never. Quite. Got. Started.

My. Whole. Damn. Life.

This is his Toxic Super-Ego at work. Surely? The Toxic Super-Ego tells Charles that he is a pathetic piece of crap just like his dad always said he was. The Toxic Super-Ego is the Parent voice. It’s his dad’s voice. It is constantly at work within him – hectoring him, lecturing him, pointing the finger. Finding fault.