Twenty Something

IAIN HOLLINGSHEAD is a freelance journalist and a regular feature contributor to the
Daily Telegraph
, in particular. He has also worked for
The Sunday Times
and written a year-long column in the
Guardian
. This is his first novel.

After graduating with a First in History from Cambridge, Iain worked for a year in Westminster, including nine months on the successful Vote 2004 campaign. During this time he found himself deported (somewhat unfairly) from Brussels, interviewed on the Today programme and featured in ‘The Sun says. In 2000 he was also deported from Ecuador for having the wrong visa in his passport.

Iain is 26 years old and lives in London with two long-suffering flatmates. You can find out a little more about him at
www.iainhollingshead.co.uk
.

Twenty Something

The quarter-life crisis of Jack Lancaster

Iain Hollingshead

This ebook edition 2011
First published in the UK in 2006 by
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
Fax: 020 7490 0080
[email protected]
www.ducknet.co.uk

Copyright © 2006 by Iain Hollingshead

‘We will remember them...', by Laurence Binyon, p. 194, reprinted with kind permission of the Society of Authors, as literary representative of the The Estate of Laurence Binyon.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

The right of Iain Hollingshead to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

 

 

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-0-7156-4115-6
ePub ISBN: 978-0-7156-4114-9
Adobe PDF ISBN: 978-0-7156-4113-2

To my parents, with much love and gratitude
(and apologies for the rude bits in what follows)

Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife.
Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life.

(Tom Lehrer, Bright College Days)

‘Fred, I was on the BBC website yesterday at work, and I started looking at their “On This Day” page. And do you know what I found out?'

‘No, do tell,' said Flatmate Fred.

‘Well, I discovered that, on this day, 30th December, in 1958, Fidel Castro's rebel guerrillas were engaged in hand-to-hand combat with government forces outside Santa Clara. I also learned that, on this day in 1971, 60,000 Iranians were deported by the Iraqis in freezing conditions at the border town of Ghassr Shirin.'

‘That's very interesting,' said Flatmate Fred.

‘It is. But then I suddenly realised that on this day, 30th December, today, I, Jack Lancaster, twenty-five years of age, heir to three million years of evolution and seventeen years of education, got up at 6.45am, showered, shat, shaved, put on Thursday's shirt and tie combination, read
Metro
on the tube, spent twelve hours staring into space at a highly paid job that I hate and then read the
Evening Standard
on the tube home again.'

‘Yeah, it's not exactly
la vida loca
, is it?' said Flatmate Fred. ‘It sounds a bit like you're having a quarter-life crisis.'

‘What's that?' I asked.

‘Like a midlife crisis, but worse,' said Flatmate Fred.

‘But a quarter-life crisis can only be half as bad as a midlife crisis, surely.'

‘Oh no, it's much worse,' said Flatmate Fred. ‘It's twenty years premature. No one gives you any sympathy and you're too young and insignificant to buy a sports car and run off with your secretary. Believe me, you have all the symptoms.'

‘Really? Well, maybe you're right.'

‘Well, maybe you should do something about it, then,' said Flatmate Fred.

Maybe.

There's something really bothering Lucy, and I just can't put my finger on it. Neither can she. She's not happy, she feels useless, undervalued, blah, blah. She thinks she's looking fat (she
is
looking fat), she misses home, she hates her job, etc. I don't listen to her properly.

‘Are you menstrual?' I ask, wisely, to show that I do listen.

Nope, she's bloody well not, she's mental. Lucy has her own unique cycle, which is the inverse of most women's — twenty-one days on, seven days off. I tell her this. She smacks me lovingly in the balls, and I come the closest I ever have to the male pain threshold. I tell her that the agony is worse than childbirth.

‘No, it's not,' she says, quietly, in that scary way of hers. ‘You just don't understand. I'm so unhappy.'

‘Well, sod it,' I tell her. ‘I'm not happy either and I was not happy first.' And with this Wildean parting shot, I storm out of her flat to go and not listen to her somewhere else.

‘Tosspot,' she screams dementedly after me.

It's 2am on New Year's Day and I have just spent the last six hours arguing with my girlfriend of three years. If you can predict the next twelve months on the basis of your New Year's Eve, it's going to be a very bad year.

Am I a tosspot?

Today is Sunday, the day of rest, the calm before the storm
of next year, and it appears a suitably restful question to think about.

I conclude that I possess all the external and surface elements of tosspottery: I still smell my farts under the duvet, I think it's cool to binge-drink every weekend until I pass out and I can't listen to a girl for more than five minutes without drifting off and imagining what she'd look like naked.

I work in a graduate job in the city, I wear a pinstripe during the week and chinos on dress-down Fridays and I live in a nice little flat with low rent because my Mum went to school with Flatmate Fred's mum (who once slept with my dad — though no one knows I know this) and so gives us a very generous rent settlement on their West London pad.

In many ways I am a smog-breathing, twentysomething, graduate arse of a stereotype.

But are there hidden depths beneath that surface? Who knows? When the woman in Prêt gives me too much change, I tell her so. When she gives me the right amount, I pop the coppers in the little metal charity tin that they hide underneath the chocolate bars. I cry at a good film, send my mum a card on Mothering Sunday and enjoy surprising Lucy. Underneath my cynical roving eye, I'm a soppy, slushy romantic at heart.

If I return home early from work I give my tube Travelcard to a friendly smackhead so he can continue to pump cheap drugs into his damaged veins. I work long hours and feel guilty about earning so much money. I'd like to do some good in the world and I'd very much like to pack it all in and spend some time travelling on the east coast of Australia.

Lucy's right: I'm a tosspot.

Sitting in my flat contemplating the year ahead.

It's not a glorious prospect: my job stinks, my girlfriend hates me and I'm a pessimistic, ungrateful sod. I am Jack the Lad; Jack
of no trades, master of absolutely nothing at all. Modern demographics will keep me working for another fifty years. Modern medicine might keep me alive for another eighty years. I am twenty-five years old and pissing my life away waiting for nostalgia.

On a more uplifting note, Flatmate Fred suggested at the end of last year that I start keeping a diary in the hope that it inspires me to do something worthwhile with my time.

‘And how exactly does that work?' I asked.

‘You can record your actions and see where you're going wrong,' he suggested. ‘Write down your thoughts and then think your way out of your current crisis.'

‘But only fat women, politicians and psychos keep diaries,' I protested.

‘Well, call it a narrative account, then. Keep it lively. Update it when you feel like it.'

‘But don't you remember that recent study which showed diarists to be the unhappiest and unhealthiest group in society?'

‘Jack, you'll fit in perfectly.'

Flatmate Fred always wins. Middle-aged losers buy fast cars and start dressing like teenagers. I'm going to write a diary. Keeping in the spirit of things, here are my belated resolutions for the new year:

I will

• play my full part at work as a proactive team member

• be a self-starter when it comes to exploring alternative career plans

• think outside of the box regularly

• attempt to move the goalposts before the close of play

• drink less

• try to love Lucy more/break up with her in a mature and dignified manner

• explore my purpose in life

• read two chapters of the Bible every evening, thereby finishing it by the end of the year

• do the same with the Koran

• explore suitable remedies for premature hair loss before it is too late

• check my testicles regularly for lumps

• set up tax-deductible direct debits to worthy charities

• exercise every second day and turn my blancmange into a six-pack

• maintain a non-political, non-psycho, non-fat-woman narrative account of my year in diary format

I will not

• indulge in blue-sky thinking or run up any kites

• spend every weekend binge-drinking

• be so dismissive to my mum

• masturbate more than four times per week

• flirt with anyone at work

• be a tosspot

• wallow in a quarter-life crisis

• complain about working past 9pm

• read
Metro
on the tube when I could take a book instead

• be such a hypochondriac

And so to bed. Alone. With Adam and Eve.

Woke up to the sound of John Humphrys tearing slabs of raw flesh off a cabinet minister — this is another of my New Year's resolutions: listen to Radio 4 in the morning and not commercial radio — and briefly contemplated committing suicide.

Not Mr Humphrys' fault, but the prospect of going back to work today was almost too much to face. Felt marginally better
after switching over to Magic FM and singing along to ‘What's the Story, Morning Glory?' while indulging in some quality Jack-time. Congratulated myself on this little postmodern irony and made a mental note that I'm only allowed three more this week.

Yesterday was a bank holiday — but, the city being the shitty city, at least half of my colleagues had come into work. What a bunch of brown-nosers. Is it only bankers who work on bank holidays? I told Rupert (my bald line manager) that I'd been at home indulging in some downtime and thinking out of the box.