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What Will Happen To You?

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
298 Seiten
Englisch
Clink Street Publishingerschienen am19.03.2024
What Will Happen to You? A dark comedy about a reluctant accountant who wishes he was someone else, doing something else, being somewhere else, but who, what and where? We track Robbie Carton's descent from his mind- numbing accounting job to...? Well, something else probably, but before that, he has to escape his life, the tarantula, Paris, an office full of absurdity, the outback, wheelie bins and of course, Bentley, Robbie's boss and natural enemy according to Robbie. Even if he manages all that, will he ever find a way to tell Sophie he loves her?

Gary N. Lines is an Australian novelist. He is the author of Doing Life In Paradise.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR18,40
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR5,99

Produkt

KlappentextWhat Will Happen to You? A dark comedy about a reluctant accountant who wishes he was someone else, doing something else, being somewhere else, but who, what and where? We track Robbie Carton's descent from his mind- numbing accounting job to...? Well, something else probably, but before that, he has to escape his life, the tarantula, Paris, an office full of absurdity, the outback, wheelie bins and of course, Bentley, Robbie's boss and natural enemy according to Robbie. Even if he manages all that, will he ever find a way to tell Sophie he loves her?

Gary N. Lines is an Australian novelist. He is the author of Doing Life In Paradise.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781915229977
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum19.03.2024
Seiten298 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse931 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14172228
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



Austin Quinn


INT. AUSTIN´S APARTMENT-NIGHT

 

One hot summer´s night, Austin Quinn, as he preferred to be called at night, sat alone in his apartment gazing at his computer screen in deep thought. It was late. He glanced up at the blue clock on the wall. It was 00.42. He turned his eyes back to the pulsing cursor. He watched it while he waited for inspiration, but all that came was perspiration. The light from the screen lit up his pallid face and made his Ken doll black hair darker. He wore a pair of cream tennis shorts. Sweat droplets ran down his chest and down the middle of his back. In his late twenties, single, and suffering from chronic loneliness, Austin Quinn hadn´t written anything new for a long time. His life lacked form. He felt he was a character in someone´s novel. The thought that it was not too late to escape hovered at the edges of his mind.

The city seemed to be melting in the heat, and Austin could detect the faint whiff of rotting garbage waiting to be collected on the sidewalks below. The city´s inhabitants hated being in the city during the summer months. They disappeared to exotic beaches or cool mountain retreats for their holidays. They sat in auditoriums with sunburnt shoulders, listening to sweating comedians forcing laughs, or in chambers open to the night sky where they looked through fat telescopes at the constellations and sipped lemonade drinks with bobbing ice. During these times, the city was unusually quiet and less malevolent, not as voracious, not as capricious, as it was in cooler times.

In the heat, the city rested´, as Austin had described it in the opening of his novel. He typed the paragraph more than once. He typed it at least once each night. He built its muscle with each repetition.


The city rested during the sweltering nights. It ignored the stench from the rotting garbage on its streets. It ignored the strange birds in its parks. It watched the few citizens still in the city but it took no particular action against them. Not while it rested. Not in this heat. Your history, where you came from, how you existed before the city, these things were irrelevant. The only thing of relevance was, what will happen to you?´


Austin Quinn didn´t know what would happen to him.

He absorbed the city´s heat as though it were a coded message. He kept his window open to catch the odd gentle waft of air. He stabbed his fork into a piece of rockmelon on a dish next to his computer. He rested the fruit on his lips before pushing it into his mouth. He crushed it with his teeth and swallowed.

He inhaled the stench from below. To Austin, that smell was the city. It was the smell of digestion, of the city´s guts, of human detritus moving through its stomach bag, its duodenum, its jejunum, its ileum, its colon, and its working anus-city streets leading to the sewer. It was the smell of the city decomposing, of life rotting. It was the best of smells, it was the worst of smells.

The words What will happen to you? appeared on buildings, across billboards, on pavements, especially on the pavements, throughout the boroughs. People looked down when they hurried along the streets. What will happen to you? scrawled in white chalk. No one knew who the author was. Was it the work of an individual anarchist? Or was it the nocturnal city itself catching its population off guard and keeping them disconcerted, rattled, off kilter? No one knew the answer to the question. But the citizens found a strange ease in the words. Was the question from the past or was it for now? Or was it for the future? Or from its antecedent, Eternity in yellow chalk? It united everyone in an instinctive way. Everyone faced the same terrifying question, and the huddled citizens found some comfort and safety in the fact that no one had the answer, but everyone together had the question.

Tonight, like many nights, Austin couldn´t write. Nothing new came. He sat still and waited. His bladder felt half full or fullish. It was difficult to be precise. He typed his opening paragraph again, his fingers flowing robotically across the keys. After a while, he crossed his forearms on his desk and rested his head on them. He wondered if a tarantula was eyeing him from some dark crevice in the room. He felt exhausted. On nights like this, he thought about Sophie Fanshawe and the privilege of kissing her. A long time ago, he took Sophie out a few times. He liked this memory. They went to dinner and had sushi. He drank cold saké, more saké than Austin knew to be optimal. He´d met her at The Writers Circle. The group met every Wednesday night at seven pm sharp. The moment he saw her, he recognised her. Sophie Fanshawe tended bar at the Stalwart pub in the city. Austin drank there Friday nights. He sat on the same stool at the bar and drank to excess and spoke to no one. He fell in love with Sophie from across the bar at the Stalwart, and again the first time he heard her dark voice in The Writers Circle, where he remained incognito. She pronounced every word. She elevated the verbs, as though they were alive and each deserved admiration. She spoke to the spellbound souls around the room. Sophie Fanshawe treated the members of The Writers Circle with reverence. They felt unique and singled out and appreciated, not pitied-as they pitied themselves, as the city pitied them.

The first time Austin attended the Circle, Sophie was invited to read snapshots of her work. Her beautiful prose left Austin stunned, with a dry mouth, fixed eyes, and a precise reduction of his usual sense of ambiguity. At times, Austin felt as though his existence was imaginary but Sophie, through her writing, made him feel real and not invented-unlike his fictional namesake Austin Quinn´ in the lauded novel, One Hot Summer´s Night, written by the American writer, Dunleavy de Boston. De Boston´s fictional Austin Quinn´s role cost him his identity within de Boston´s novel- identity´ was one of de Boston´s thematic obsessions.

It was no coincidence Austin´s name happened to be the same as Dunleavy de Boston´s character. Austin had chosen the name himself for The Writers Circle. It was a convenience for Austin that the convenor of The Writers Circle had set a writing exercise for everyone in the Circle, before Austin joined, which was to write a story that incorporated de Boston´s reluctant anti-detective character, Austin Quinn. The task was to prompt the group into writing about an already fully formed literary character. Everyone laughed when Austin introduced himself on his first night. He made out he didn´t understand why, and it was explained they were all writing stories about an Austin Quinn´, Dunleavy de Boston´s fictional Austin Quinn´. And now they had their own real Austin Quinn in their circle. Austin didn´t tell them he wasn´t real and there was nothing accidental about his name. He´d known about their writing exercise before he joined and chose the name intentionally. It may have been the only time there was any laughter in the group, but not all had laughed. Some demurred, which required acting. Some wiped sweat from their foreheads with tentative fingers. Some adjusted clothing but to no purpose. Some felt diminished, grey, and looked down, and pinched their fleshy arms.

Austin fell in love with Sophie, as Austin Quinn, and this caused a complication for him and Sophie because his name was not Austin Quinn, and Sophie knew this.

But all that was long ago, and now Austin no longer attended The Writers Circle. He was beyond that. Austin missed Sophie. Sitting at his desk in his apartment, Austin thought of the absence Sophie had left in his life-a gigantic black abyss, an absence bigger than her presence. It made no sense. Right now though, Austin could taste her open lips. Her lips tasted of rockmelon. He thought of making love to her, caressing her, attending to her, then after, wrapping her in a white silk mantle. He thought of the female black widow spider eating the male after sex. After sex with Sophie, Austin knew he would have felt bereft, dislocated, lost, not himself, as though making love to her would have put quotation marks around his life and left him suspended and mute. Intimacy with Sophie would have shone a vivid beam on his life and exposed to him what it wasn´t, rather than what it was. It was as though the intimacy acted as an inflection point to reinforce what he knew-that he barely existed, that what existence he tried to grasp was fictional, imaginary at best, and was only present in her company. Intimacy with Sophie would drain from him what little there was to drain. He didn´t tell Sophie any of this, but he wished he had. She would have been gentle, and she would have smiled at the poetics of it, and she would have made him feel three-dimensional, and he could have told her who he was, although she already knew. She would have reassured him with her touch. One time, she told him he was her favourite character and, in so many ways, she told him she loved him. She used the word character´ like people use the word person´. He lost her, but his enduring memory of Sophie resulted in a feeling of gratitude. After he admitted to himself, he loved her, Austin disappeared from her life....

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