Hitting the Jackpot: a brilliantly funny comedy perfect for fans of Nick Hornby by Tom Alan

Author:Tom Alan [Alan, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books - contemporary fiction
Published: 2023-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

He watches the lights from the cars in the street moving across his ceiling. Why do the lights travel in the opposite direction to the cars? When a car goes down the road, the lights sweep across the ceiling in the opposite direction. He’s never puzzled it out. Fixating on it, simply giving a damn about it, is a sign he can’t sleep.

He’s pretty sure he’s fallen in love with Milly. He’s got a fair idea she’s falling – or has fallen – in love with him. They haven’t used the words yet, still slightly afraid that this can’t be happening, but he feels it. Sees it in her eyes. Senses it in the air around them. There’s a sort of excited calmness that he’s never felt in anybody else’s company.

Cindy had been sex. Sure, she was fun and lively and all the rest of it. But, if he’s really honest with himself, it’d been mainly about sex for him. Well, sex while stoned and drunk and on holiday. She’d been pretty keen too.

Milly’s different. The sex is great. It’s all the rest of it that’s really taken his breath away, lit his fire, stoned his crows, emptied his head of any original phrases. All the extra stuff he never felt with Cindy. He could watch Milly all night, he can’t put his finger on what it is, but she captivates him. He finds himself staring at her as she makes a point and has to will himself to concentrate on what she’s saying, rather than gawp at the beauty of how she’s saying it. It’s silly things, little inconsequential nothings, like the way she suddenly looks up at him when she asks him something. Like what he might say carries great weight and importance. No one’s ever looked up at him like that before. He’s almost started to crave it; he feels like a child in class waiting for a word of praise from a favourite teacher in a flowery summer dress.

Apart from the lottery moment, they’ve agreed on pretty much everything. They like reading, they like films and theatre, they like to travel, to try different foods. They also, the dangerous part, seem to like each other, without having to try too hard, or pretend too much.

Even the music, which he had thought was going to be a barrier between them, ended up, miraculously, bringing them even closer together. In fact, as she named practically every piece (see, it’s easy) they played on Classic FM, he’d found he recognised (and quite liked) half of them. There was the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now (that was Wagner, but you say it like it’s got a V not a W); and the kiss in the fields from A Room with a View, which was opera, Puccini, Italian guy; and even Verdi played a bit on the Nike, Nothing Beats a Londoner ad. Actually, he didn’t exactly play it for the ad, he’s dead, but it was his music, and Jack

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