How can you continue to live inside a thing that you no longer believe in?

That would be like praying to a God who didn’t exist, surely?

No.

No.

I Am Sovereign.

The Author just needs to hope. And she needs to love. And she needs to believe, in spite of.

The Author planned – earlier on in the novella – to end the work with Denny Neale (who was then Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ego) doing a runner with the teddy, and with Ying Due ‘borrowing’ Charles’s late mother’s bike and careering into the town on it in hot pursuit.

But this seems all wrong now. The Author can’t bear the idea of those four people leaving Charles’s tiny work room. They feel so alive to her, all standing there, pushed up, shoved up, close together. There is something so strange, so unlikely, so wonderfully intimate about it all.

It dawns on The Author, as she types this, that the room as she describes it (Charles’s work room) is exactly like the tiny study in which she herself habitually sits to write. So these four characters are actually here, are they not? In The Author’s tiny study, keeping The Author company? The Author has unwittingly brought them here. They are crowding around The Author. Look! They are crashing into her bookshelves, they are poking her with their elbows, they are oppressing her with their demands, they are breathing down her neck. They are bitching and carping and buzzing and rippling and jingling and jangling with their own sweet significance. And The Author loves them all so much, so very dearly, that she cannot bear to say goodbye to them, somehow.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

William Heinemann
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William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Nicola Barker 2019
Cover photograph © benhood/RooM/Getty Images
Cover based on a design by Alex Kirby

Nicola Barker has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Epigraph on p. vii taken from ‘Choruses from The Rock’ by T.S. Eliot.
Used with kind permission of Clare Reihill at the T.S. Eliot Foundation.

First published by William Heinemann in 2019

www.penguin.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781473571099

Footnote

8. Let’s eat Grandma.Let’s eat, Grandma.Commas save lives.

1 shagua means, quite literally, ‘dumb melon’.