10 Things That Never Happened (Material World #1)

by Alexis Hall

I am in no way surprised that Jonathan Forest drives a BMW. I’m sure there is, somewhere in the world, a man who drives a BMW and is not a bellend but I’ve not met him.

It’s a bit weird, really. I mean I don’t need all this but there’s a tiny little part of me that enjoys watching Jonathan doing things as long as the things he’s doing aren’t firing me or backing me into a Nexa by MERLYN 8mm Sliding Door Shower enclosure.

“Jonathan,” I say, “I’m going for a walk.” He doesn’t even look up from his laptop. “You are not.” “I think I am. My feet are going one in front of the other and everything.”

There’s woodpeckers here, apparently, and Dartford warblers. Not that I’d know a Dartford warbler if I fell over one while it was warbling its distinctive warble of I’m from Dartford.

Turns out, going to a supermarket is like wiping your arse. You mostly do it alone so you assume everyone does it the same way you do, but there’s actually a surprising amount of variation.

Because I don’t think he was born a prick. I think he had prickness thrust upon him.

At some point we’re going to have address the elephant in the room and, by elephant, I mean gigantic fucking binder. “So,” I ask, “what’s with the gigantic fucking binder?”

“She made little Anthea cry,” adds Les. “Oh be fair”—this is Auntie Jack—“those braces did make her look like she’d tried to perform oral sex on a shopping trolley.” “Don’t make it the right thing to say to a fourteen-year-old,” replies Del.

Jonathan throws his actual hands in the actual air. It’s probably the campest thing he’s ever done but it comes from the heart.

Eventually, though, I’m called through to the middle reception room to give my opinion. My opinion, if I’m being totally candid, is that it looks a bit shit.

They say people look different when they’re asleep. Younger or softer or more attractive or more vulnerable or something. But not Jonathan. Sleep just makes him look like an experimental piece from a sculptor who’s going through an abstract period,

“You can’t call your family an inconvenience.” “I can when they’re being inconvenient,”

There’s a couple of seconds’ silence. It’s just long enough for me to reflect on how I always figured that once I was grown up like, I’d be one of them adults that’s easy for young people to talk to, and apparently I’m not.

“It’s immersive,” Tiff says, like that means something. I’m not having that. “All rooms are immersive. You’re inside the bloody thing. You can’t get more immersive.”

His eyes have that faint tinge of red they get when you’re technically not crying and steering very hard into that technicality.

It turns out that shooting the elephant in the room just leaves you with a dead elephant, and a dead elephant takes up as much space as a live one, and has a tendency to smell.

Jonathan heaves a sigh that’s more long-suffering than he’s really entitled to given he’s not been suffering very long

I’m doing that in-the-car kind of singing along where you find out two lines in that you don’t know the words half as well as you thought you did, and just find yourself going “murmurmur manana something” then belting out the title of the song really loudly in the hope that it’ll make up for how badly you botched the rest of it.

It’s just that he’s, y’know, a micromanaging workaholic, and the thing about my team is that, for better or worse, they dispense an awful lot of workahol.

I’ve got, if I’m honest, ambivalent feelings about Sheffield. On the plus side, it’s not London, but that’s an advantage it shares with literally every other city in the world.

I’m getting the impression that if you pushed Jonathan into a deep pit he’d immediately yell up at you to throw him a shovel.

“Barbara Jane”—I hear Wendy’s voice down the line, quieter than usual but that’s a relative thing—“give your brother his phone back.” “Shan’t.”