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David Nicholls

David Nicholls Books

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One Day

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Us

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You Are Here

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Us: A Novel

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Starter for Ten

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“The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at . . . something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.”

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Book:One Day
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“I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust ... So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a tiny trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food.”

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“Live each day as if it's your last,' that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? [...] Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at... something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”

LoveLifePassion
Book:One Day
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“Can I say something?' 'Go on' 'I'm a little drunk' 'Me too. That's okay.' 'Just....I missed you, you know.' 'I missed you too.' 'But so, so much, Dexter. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and you weren't there-' 'same here.' 'I tell you what it is. It's.....When I didn't see you, I thought about you every day, I mean EVERY DAY in some way or another-' 'same here.' '-Even if it was just "I wish Dexter could see this" or "Where's Dexter now?" or "Christ that Dexter, what an idiot", you know what I mean, and seeing you today, well, I thought I'd got you back - my BEST friend. And now all this, the wedding, the baby- I'm so happy for you, Dex, but it feels like I've lost you again.'- -'You know what happens you have a family, your responsibilities change, you lose touch with people' 'It won't be like that, I promise.' 'Do you?' 'Absolutely' 'You swear? No more disappearing?' 'I won't if you won't.' Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of glorious confusion.”

LoveFriendshipMoving On
Book:One Day
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“No, this, she felt, was real life and if she wasn’t as curious or passionate as she had once been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour and intensity of a twenty-two-year-old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a whole day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of these nerve-jangling highs and lows. The friends they had now would be the friends they had in five, ten, twenty years’ time. They expected to get neither dramatically richer or poorer; they expected to stay healthy for a little while yet. Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not overly happy. Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them: ‘We grew up together.”

LifeRomance
Book:One Day
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“Lonely' is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like 'sad' or 'strange'. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not 'lonely', more solitary than I'd hoped to be at that time.”

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“perhaps there had been something a little obsessive about it, the way she’d consumed the shelves of the local library, Blyton to Jansson, C. S. Lewis to P. G. Wodehouse, Christie then du Maurier then the Brontës, reading indiscriminately but always passionately, so that even her dislikes were passionate. Dickens, she thought, was preachy and silly, like a teacher putting on funny voices, but never mind, here were Jane Austen and Sue Townsend, Ursula K. Le Guin and Jean M. Auel, and each Saturday morning she’d return her stack of library books, the maximum permitted, placing them on the counter, like a gambler cashing in chips.”

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Book:You Are Here
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“Books saw her through the pupal stage of thirteen to sixteen, frowning at Kafka and Woolf, then tearing through John Irving and Maeve Binchy, widely read in the proper sense, making no distinction between Jilly Cooper and Edith Wharton. There were stories on film and TV and, a little later, in the rolling melodrama of the internet, but those were team activities, noisy and social. Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.”

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Book:You Are Here
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“But life seemed fuller, more populated than it had a year ago. She went to exhibitions and films, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, and when she’d saved enough of Neil’s money, which was her money, she went on a solo trip to Italy, role-playing a character in a Forster novel. In Florence, she read performatively in cafés and sat in the cool of exquisite churches, straining for some kind of spiritual feeling. In Rome, she visited the Non-Catholic Cemetery and sought out the graves of Keats and Shelley and found herself moved and mortified by being moved.”

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Book:You Are Here
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“By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.' Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.”

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Book:Us
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“By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.”

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Book:Us
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“To take an analogy from botany, she imagined a child as an unopened flower; a parent had a responsability to provide light and water, but also to stand back and watch. 'He can do anything he wants', she said, 'as long as he's happy and cool.' In contrast, I saw no reason why the flower should not be bracketed to a bamboo stick, pruned, exposed to artificial light; if it made for a stronger, more resilient plant, why not? (pag. 337)”

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“With failing bravado, Dexter tried to laugh. "You sound like you're dumping me!" She smiled sadly. "I suppose I am in a way. You're not who you used to be, Dex, I really, really liked the old one. I'd like him back, but in the meantime, I'm sorry, but I don't think you should phone me anymore." She turned and, a little unsteadily, began to walk off down the side alley in the direction of Leicester Square. For a moment, Dexter had a fleeting but perfectly clear memory of himself at his mother's funeral, curled up on the bathroom floor while Emma held onto him and stroked his hair.Yet somehow he had managed to treat this as nothing, to throw it all away for dross. He followed a little way behind her. "Come on, Em, we're still friends aren't we? I know I've been a little weird, it's just..." She stopped for a moment, but didn't turn round, and he knew that she was crying. "Emma?" Then very quickly she turned, walked up to him and pulled his face to hers, her cheek warm and wet against his, speaking quickly and quietly in his ear, and for one bright moment he thought he was to be forgiven. "Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will." Her lips touched his cheek. "I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry." And then she was gone, and he found himself on the street, standing alone in this back alley trying to imagine what he would possibly do next.”

Friendships Ending
Book:One Day
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“I hate this complete obsession with class, especially at this place, you can hardly say 'hello' to anyone before they are getting all prolier-than-thou and telling you about how their dad's a one eyed chimney-sweep with rickets, and how they've still got an outside loo, and have never been on a plane or whatever, all that dubious crap, most of which is usually lies anyway, and I'm thinking why are you telling me this? Am I meant to feel guilty? D'you think it's my fault or something, or are you just feeling pleased with yourself for escaping your pre-determined social role or some self congratulatory bullshit? I mean, what does it matter anyway? People are people, if you ask me, and they rise or fall by their own talents and merits, and their own labours, and blaming the fact they've got a settee rather than a sofa, or eat tea rather tan dinner, that's just an excuse, it's just whining self-pity and shoddy thinking.... I don;t make judgements about other people because of their background and I expect people to treat me with the same courtesy... It's my parent's moeny and its not as if they got it from nicking people's dole or running sweatshops in Johannesburg or something. They worked fucking hard for what they've got. It's a privilege and they treat it as such and they do their best to give something back. But if you ask me, theres no snob like an inverted snob... Im just so fucking bored of people trying to pass plain old envy off as some sort of virtue.”

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Book:Starter for Ten
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“The inability to control a child's recollections is a frustrating one. I know my own parents did their best to provide sun-dappled days of picnics and paddling pools, but mainly I remember advertising jingles, wet socks on radiators, inane TV theme tunes, arguments about wasted food. With my own sun, there were times when I definitely thought 'remember this' - Albie toppling through the high grass of a summer meadow, the three of us lolling in bed on a winter Sunday (...) - wishing there was some way to press 'record'.”

ParenthoodChildFamily LifeRecollections
Book:Us
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“I know from your letters and from seeing you after your play that you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that’s okay that’s alright because we’re all meant to be like that at twenty-four. In fact our whole generation is like that. I read an article about it, it's because we never fought in a war or watched too much television or something.”

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“What are you going to do with your life?" In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer... "Live each day as if it's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”

Inspirational
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“So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!”

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Author:David Nicholls
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