A Question of Attraction by David Nicholls

Author:David Nicholls
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588363718
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

22

QUESTION: Finding its origins in the thirty-one-syllable “tanka,” which Japanese poetic form consists of seventeen syllables, arranged in lines of five, seven, and five?

ANSWER: The haiku.

Rebecca Epstein’s response is to laugh. She lies on my futon in the student house on Richmond Hill, and laughs and laughs, kicking her Doc Martens with sadistic glee.

“It’s not that funny, Rebecca.”

“Och, no, trust me, it is.”

I give up, and go and change the record.

“I’m sorry, Jackson, but it’s just the idea of them all hiding in the woodshed until you’ve definitely gone . . .” This sets her off again, so I decide to go into Josh’s room and get more home-brewed beer.

I’m with Mum for another eighteen hours before I decide to go back to college. Once again, I tell her it’s because I need some specialist books from the library, and she shrugs, only half-believing, and by ten o’clock, I’m on the doorstep again, rejecting the same groceries.

On the train back, I start to cheer up a bit. So what if I’m spending New Year alone in a student house? I can get some work done, read, go for long walks, play music as loud as I want. And tomorrow, on New Year’s Eve, I’ll fight the ridiculous tradition that says we have to go out and get drunk and have fun. I’ll stay in instead, and not have fun. I’ll still get drunk but I’ll read a book, and fall asleep at 11:58 P.M. That’ll teach them, I convince myself, without really knowing who “they” are.

But as soon as I arrive back at the student house, I realize I’ve made a terrible mistake. As I open the front door, a waft of warm, yeasty gas from Marcus and Joshua’s home-brew Yorkshire Bitter hits me, and it’s as if the whole house had just burped in my face. I go into Joshua’s room, and find the plastic barrel bubbling and hissing near a fully on radiator. I open the window to let some of the intestinal gas out.

No one’s back yet, obviously, which is what I’d hoped, but I don’t think I was prepared for the house to be quite this empty. So I decide to go to the minimarket on the corner. It’s 5:45, the optimum time for buying reduced-price food.

The purchase of reduced-price food isn’t something one should enter into lightly. The dented canned goods are generally safe, but with “fresh” produce, frankly it’s a minefield. As a general rule of thumb, the degree to which the price is reduced is proportional to the danger involved in actually eating it, so the trick is to go for something that’s still a bargain without actually giving you stomach cramps; a measly 10p off a pound of blue-gray braising steak is hardly worth the risk, but a whole chicken for 25p is just asking for trouble. Also beef and chicken are generally safer than pork and fish. Old pork is no fun for anyone, whereas with old beef you can at least kid yourself that it’s not “off,” it’s just “well-hung.

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