You Are Here

by David Nicholls

Year by year, friends were lost to marriage and parenthood with partners she didn’t care for or who didn’t care for her, retreating to new, spacious, ordered lives in Hastings or Stevenage, Cardiff or York while she fought on in London.

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. And

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.

The risks involved in romantic love, the potential for hurt and betrayal and indignity, far outweighed the consolations.

she just missed other people, specifically and generally, and if the prospect of social contact sometimes felt daunting, exhausting, intimidating, then it was still preferable to this small and shrinking life inside her fifty-four square metres on the top floor.

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...

was no good. She would have to...

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 them even as she rolled her eyes at them, and in turn they worried about her and protected her from anything too complicated: illness, sex, unhappiness, the larger human emotions.

She had no strong feelings about Formula One, placing it in a category of things that appeal to men, like wetsuits and samurai swords and big watches. Conrad’s

Or when friends used to say or imply that they were jealous, lucky you, all that freedom, all that sleep, that kind of thing? “You can have a lie-in, Marnie, you can be hung-over all the time, you can smoke crack, no one gives a fuck.” It’s true I do have time and freedom and I love it, sometimes. But the notion that I should be “making the most of it”, travelling the world or out every night, there’s a kind of tyranny in that too, that life has to be full, like your life’s a hole that you have to keep filling, a leaky bucket, and not just fulfilled but seen to be fulfilled.

‘By the end I did.’ She shrugged. ‘I realise that this sounds like I’m putting on a brave face, but we make too big a deal about being alone. People aren’t meant to spend their whole adult lives with one other person. In fact, very few do. Well, not very few, but your parents, mine, they’re not the majority. And lots of people live without a life partner. I don’t know why this perfectly common thing’s thought of as odd or sad.’