Wild Twin by Jeff Young, an extract

There are horses and angels and a broken bird in a shoebox nest. Soon it will be daylight, and my dad will come home from the printing factory nightshift. I don’t want him to come home, or rather when he does come home, I want to be invisible.

My dad is a kind and gentle soul with pale blue eyes. Sometimes they remind me of winter. Grey rather than blue, a degree too close to ice to enter. I have often found it difficult to look into those eyes, and today will be more difficult than ever. It’s not because of him or his eyes that I want to be invisible. I have always felt that way. The dream of disappearing.

It’s seven o’clock on a Monday morning in March, sometime in the 1970s, and I’m not going to work. In fact, I’m never going there again because I never wanted to work there in the first place. Once, an airship circled the building, and the world was strange and beautiful for a few hours. Another time, a ladybird plague turned the walkways into an architecture of insects. On the day a princess came to open the building, gardeners came in lorries to decorate the streets with thousands of flowers and the city became a garden. The rest of the time this office block was a deathly place, where men disintegrated before your eyes and drowned their misery in endless cups of vending machine hot chocolate and drunken lunchtimes. There was the man who drank oxtail soup while he read the Bible, using a nasal inhaler to stir his brew. There was the man who went for three-hour, five-pints-of-bitter lunches, forcing himself to vomit in the toilet cubicle before resuming work. There was also the receptionist who wrote the words Zoological Starfucker in a ledger of planning applications, and never explained their meaning. The valuation officer who answered every question with either Tickety-boo or Deary fuck… The main function of the department I worked in seemed to be buying up derelict buildings and demolishing them, to make way for traffic widening schemes, to kill the city and replace it with roads. My job was to collect document folders from the desks of men, put them in filing cabinets, deliver more documents to more desks, and then collect the folders again later and put them back in filing cabinets. I also refilled the photocopier with paper. And broke the photocopier. That was more or less my job. The dole sent me. I thought the council would reject me, but they took me on the spot and told me it was a job for life. I didn’t want the job for life.

***

Jeff Young is a writer for theatre, radio, screen and print whose TV credits include Casualty, Eastenders and CBBC. He broadcasts episodes for Radio 3, collaborates with artists and musicians on sound installations and performances, and has worked on many arts projects in Liverpool and elsewhere, including in Bill Drummond’s Curfew Tower. Until recently he was a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the author of the Costa Prize shortlisted Ghost Town.

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