Blackheath - Softcover

Adam Baron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908434902 ISBN 13: 9781908434906

Publisher: Myriad Editions, 2016

Synopsis

Blackheath is a groundbreaking and sharply comic tale of life after children, revealing the awful truth at the heart of modern family life: love is not enough.

Amelia has everything: two perfect children, a successful husband who loves her, and a big house in London's affluent Blackheath. So why does she wake up one morning with a distaste for her daughter and an unexplained attraction to James, a dad she sees in the playground at drop off?

James has everything: a happy marriage to poet and fellow academic Alice and two young children. James loves his kids intensely, but caring for them during the week makes him feel like a failure. When his wife's star begins to rise, James is tempted back into his old career on the comedy circuit, looking for a way to cure his sense that something vital is missing.

As all of their lives increasingly overlap, the repercussions threaten to blow both families apart.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Baron is the author of four crime novels, which have been widely translated and dramatised on BBC Radio 4. He has worked as an actor, journalist, comedy writer/performer and in-house writer for Channel 4 Television. He is currently MA Course Director in Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. He lives in Greenwich, London, with his wife and three young children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Blackheath

By Adam Baron

Myriad Editions

Copyright © 2016 Adam Baron
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-908434-90-6

CHAPTER 1

She feels nothing. There is an absence where love should be. A long, flat greyness. Another absence: guilt. For this is her daughter she is looking at. This pale, thin girl shovelling Cheerios, gabbing on about Mrs Friel and after-school club. Violin. Yet she feels no guilt at all for this lack of love, feels nothing in fact except relief. She stares as the girl finishes the startled little shapes and begins to spoon milk.

— Come on, she says. Someone says. Her. We'll be late.

— It's not even eight. We've got, like, an hour.

She doesn't reply. Just gazes at the slim, naked-looking spoon her daughter leaves on the side of the bowl until the girl is standing there with her coat on.

— Mum! You're not even dressed. What's the matter with you?

In the enclosed, high-walled playground she looks around as though she's never been there before. The children whirl like windblown litter. The adults cling in twos and threes, knots she's been tangled in so often but shivers at today. Why? She frowns, watching as children touch base, remind, cajole, ask permission, while her daughter is lost amid the mêlée. She doesn't care about this. She just wants to leave and she starts to do that but the crowd's too thick, a last flood pouring through the playground gate as if getting to school is not something they do five days out of seven. She could push through but another thing stops her, the past like a raised sheet of glass. Reception. The very small ones, whom she hardly notices any more. They look like wind-up toys and their parents too are different. More focused, their energy heading down as they apply kisses like hats or scarves, faces riven with smiles, voices cut with chipper bonhomie. Did she feel like this with Niamh? Or, before, with Michael? That a piece of her flesh was about to be dragged off into some giant mincer? She turns, disconcerted, wanting now to see her own daughter and look inside for some echo. But the girl, in deep with the most tedious of her friends, is just hair, hands, too many limbs. Someone else's child. The relief she feels now is total and she tries to leave again, though again she doesn't make it.

She's pushed back by a man. Another Reception father, late, blowing his cheeks out as he presses his child into the joggling line. And something happens, something light and startling ... happens before she has even taken him in properly. She does that as the feeling grows, takes shape, firms itself inside her until she cannot pretend it is anything other than what it is.

She wants to fuck him.

It's a simple thought. Clear and shiny, almost making her laugh. This man, two seconds old, she wants to fuck him or, more accurately, let him fuck her. He's not tall – her height, though he's handsome. Blond, cross-looking, leaping blue eyes and three-day stubble she can feel on the insides of her thighs. She stares at him, not worried he'll see because he's homed in on his kid, kneeling, making the boy laugh. When he stands she finds herself moving, doing so without thinking, which is so odd because she's a person who, she knows, thinks far too much. She cuts through the Year One line as if it isn't there.

— His bag, she says.

A moment. Face turning. He looks at her. Some grey in the stubble. Lips plump, a little like a woman's. Saved by a jaw that's firm and tight.

— I'm sorry?

— His bag. You're holding it.

And he is. The green school bag he's obviously carried there is still slung over his shoulder.

— Thanks. He laug

Edition details

• Publisher: Myriad Editions
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908434902
• ISBN 13: 9781908434906
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352