You Are Here

by David Nicholls

Others were lost to apathy or carelessness, friendship like a thank-you letter she kept meaning to write until too much time had passed and it became an embarrassment.

But solitary conversation was like playing yourself at Scrabble, it was hard to be surprised or challenged.

There is who we want to be, she thought, and there is who we are. As we get older the former gives way to the latter, and maybe this is who I am now, someone better off by themselves. Not happier, but better off. Not an introvert, just an extrovert who had lost the knack.

Sometimes, she thought, it’s easier to remain lonely than present the lonely person to the world, but she knew that this, too, was a trap, that unless she did something, the state might become permanent, like a stain soaking into wood.

She had become addicted to the buzz of the cancelled plan. It was a small and fleeting high and no one would ever look back fondly at all the times they’d managed to get out of something, but for the moment no words were sweeter to Marnie than ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make it.’ It was like being let off an exam that she expected to fail.

She loved Cleo, a good and constant friend, fiercely loyal but also fierce, and while it was humiliating to be told off, she knew this feeling would pass, replaced by immense relief.

Instead she’d care for others, revive her friendships and make new ones, engage in the messy, confusing business of other people.

At home he was merely lonely. Stepping outside transformed loneliness to solitude, a far more dignified state because it was his choice.

She was observing the hell out of things, remembering the power of a train journey to turn life into montage, a sequence conveying change.

But something had happened to her confidence in those months, and even when restrictions eased, her own life barely altered.

but encounters with other men always seemed pre-loaded with rivalry and suspicion, the handshake tight, the smiles too, and he wondered if, after a certain age, men could ever really like each other.

She might put a finger to her nostril and blow, like a footballer, but was there a way to do this coquettishly, to hawk and spit with élan, to kittenishly throw up?

A common mistake in manuscripts was confusion over the words ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’, the first meaning to want what someone else has, the second including the fear that someone might take what’s yours.

She would shrug off this self-pity but shrugging hurt and here it was, creeping in again like damp in the walls, the loneliness, present even in company.

Circular anxieties, ancient regrets, there wasn’t a mountain in all England that could obscure them.

But even if nothing had happened, it was humiliating to be abandoned like this – a bad date in front of a friend, in front of her godson! – and, once again, she was confronted by the gulf between expectation and reality, no sun on her face, no union with nature, no laughter with friends, no sex.

No matter how carefully you packed your bag, there was no protection against this furious disappointment.

‘I don’t know. Time passing, mortality, your place in things, how insignificant you are.’

Could he ever have the first without the second, stop watching over himself?

The stories we tell about ourselves are never neutral: they’re shaped and structured to create an impression,

For the moment she felt content, not because she’d spoken but because she’d been listened to.

No one wanted to be confronted with that much honesty on an afternoon’s walk, but to turn it into tired anecdote was scarcely better.

I would have liked to have loved someone. It felt conceited to declare that you had something to give and yet this was the truest thing she’d said, and also the most embarrassing.

There was rarely anything spontaneous about her spontaneity. Calculations were required;

it was this absence of a reason to leave that was the greatest reason to stay.

Do I have to have hobbies and projects and lovers? Do I have to excel? Can’t I just be happy, or unhappy, just mess about and read and waste time and be unfulfilled by myself?’

‘Never, ever go outside. Yes, I’ve been trying it but that doesn’t work either. It’s a cycle, isn’t it, a trap? You’re not with someone, so best not be with anyone.’

With no expectation, he had spent three days in the company of a nice new human being and now he was going to ruin it by wanting more.

Conversation had its challenges and risks, but for now it was preferable to being alone. Plenty of opportunity for that.

the years of the great seclusion, she’d found herself wishing for the darkness so that she could justify going to bed. Now she wanted to prolong the days, to wish them brighter and to occupy them fully.

Michael spoke the most and she thought, not for the first time, that if you wanted to get a man to talk with real emotion, you should ask him about his father.

What she didn’t envy was the look that Michael had spoken of on the hillside, the widow’s shock at the sudden absence, and perhaps solitude is more frightening when something is snatched away.

Such hatred was a cumbersome thing to carry, yet there was undoubtedly excitement in hatred too, in his own fantasies of revenge, and this was also shaming.

She was exceptional, and there was no doubt that he was happier with Marnie around and to be happier in someone’s presence rather than alone felt like a breakthrough.

What if he asked me to stay on and finish the walk? Is that what he wants? If he asks me, if he asks me, I will. I will stay with him and walk into the sea.

feeling like she did as a child after Christmas, not just sad it was over but disappointed at how it had been, a sense of something unachieved, the difference being, she supposed, that Christmas would come again.

She felt suddenly overwhelmingly alone, and this was absolutely fine and might only be a problem if you’d been anticipating something else.

the hours flew by with barely a thought of Michael, of where he was and what he was doing, what had happened last night and what had gone wrong between them, whether he was thinking of her and whether he might text or call, how angry she was with him and how sad and stupid she felt and whether she might ever see him again and what the weather was like in Yorkshire and the landscape and how his feet felt and how far there was to go. Blissfully, she was free of all those thoughts.

‘Silly bugger,’ said Graham,