You Are Here

by David Nicholls

On New Year’s Day, shivering on the sofa, she turned on the TV to find that her streaming device had compiled a sarcastic slideshow of her photographs, entitled What A Year!: her oven light-bulb, a recipe for hearty lentil soup, a close-up of an ingrowing hair, her National Insurance number, the flapping sole of a faulty shoe, the mole on her shoulder, a gas-meter reading, a dry-cleaning receipt, the shard of green glass she’d found in a salad, then back to the oven light-bulb, all accompanied Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’.

The single word that best described her room was ‘gudgeon’. A monolithic wardrobe, a clot-coloured eiderdown, duvet and pillow filled with something fibrous, asbestos perhaps, it was the kind of place you might stay the night before a relative’s funeral.

she furiously resented belonging to a generation whose future security depended on their parents’ death, so that only orphans could afford a holiday.