Don't Come Looking by AJ Campbell (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

my plans. He couldn’t hold it together, could he? Exploding into his audience like a firework gone astray – on his eighteenth birthday of all days too! That’s what happens when life has always been cosy fires and hot cocoa.

Oh, well, as they say, the show must go on.

I wander over to my bedroom window and pull the curtains aside. Just enough to follow the chaos. That woman, Sasha’s friend, the pretty blonde one, is picking up the remaining mess from where everyone was dancing. If that’s what you can call hopping and jumping up and down like a mob of kangaroos. Her husband is following her around, a cardboard box on his lap, helping her collect shards of glass, a snapped stiletto heel and crushed party popper shells from an eighteenth birthday party gone so publicly wrong.

People I don’t know – Harry’s family, perhaps? – and Pete are helping Dad clear the mess from the bar into black bin liners and recycling crates as my mum and Pen discard the remains of all that crap Hannah was serving up. Ah, sweet, vulnerable Hannah. I feel bad my plans had to involve her. She doesn’t deserve it, but what could I do?

It’s strange how, for so long, years in fact, while everyone lived such seemingly perfect, happy lives, I thought I was the fucked-up one. But now, I know, apart from Hannah, I’m the only sane one around here.

Where do I start? Take that prick, Pete, for one. Does he know his slapper wife is cheating on him with the ginger opposite? And what about all the others around here? Surely they’ve caught on too. I find it hard to believe not. I’m aware, and I don’t even live with her. Not that it takes a member of Mensa to work it out. I mean, why would you regularly visit a dog grooming parlour when you don’t even own a dog? And I’ve seen her trying to slip out of his house unnoticed after their weekly rendezvous. You’d think they’d be more discreet. Someone really should tell him that he needs to rearrange his trousers before he leaves her studio, not while he’s walking back to his own house.

Maybe they don’t care. Not that I blame her. If I were her, I’d be searching for an escape from the life with that prick she calls her husband. And I should know what an obnoxious moron he is. I have the damning proof from when that dreaded, toe-curling time arrived, in the winter of year twelve, when, as part of our school’s careers programme, I had no choice but to undergo a week’s work experience during my Christmas break, that my dad arranged with Pete.

It wasn’t my idea. I’ve never had any intention of going into the City when I finish my education. I’ve always wanted to pursue my photography – but my dad insisted I give it a try. ‘Get a job in that environment, and you’ll never be broke. You’re so clever, you could make a fortune in one of those banks or brokers,’ he said, as if he were colluding with the haughty school careers adviser who agreed with him that I had the brains to make it big in the City.

‘If you go into media, you’ll always be poor. Precious few make it to stardom. Do it the sensible way. Make your fortune, secure your future, and you’ll be free to do whatever you want. The world will be your oyster,’ Dad kept saying. After much resistance – I was a teenager, after all – I clammed up and agreed. Because all I wanted was to please him. That was before, though.

Before I found out the truth.

The small outfit that Pete the Prick worked for in those days occupied half the ninth floor of an imposing, glass-fronted high-rise, smack bang in the nucleus of the City. The building had at least twenty levels, maybe more, and on the outside, a lift travelled up and down all day, impressing its riders with extensive views of London. The panoramic sights did nothing for me, and I hate elevators. So, I always ended up taking the stairs. He works somewhere else now – a similar type of operation, full of pricks, where I’m sure he fits in equally as well.

I hated every second of every day I spent there. The offices were nice, sleek and crammed with excessive luxury – from the marble floors and high-end everything, to the smell and feel of the expensive leather chairs. Pete explained how the acoustic environment, air-quality and lighting had all been designed to boost employee productivity. Even the coffee tasted gourmet. From his large workstation, composed of ten or so computer screens displaying yawn-inducing charts and graphs, figures and trends, you could vaguely see workers at similar desks in the surrounding mirror properties. A cluster of glass display cases with people inside screaming, ‘Look at us, aren’t we a cut above the rest?’

That week turned out to be an endless nightmare. That’s what I thought at the time. As it turns out, it helped kickstart my plans this year. To begin with, the hours were long. I left and arrived home in the dark. Why would anyone want to live like that? I still don’t understand. Then there was the crammed Tube journey, congested with suckers who believed the only way to success was to occupy their desks from dawn to dusk. Every morning, I had to endure that painful experience with Pete wittering on about how he anticipated the markets to behave that day while he ogled anything dressed in a skirt.

‘So, tell me, boy, what kind of girl are you attracted to?’ he asked the first morning of that miserable week. ‘Blondes, brunettes, or redheads?’

I shrugged, cringing, not daring to answer that I didn’t know if it were girls or boys I was attracted to. I thought it could be both.

The first two evenings, I suffered the return Tube journey