Disappointing his bank manager, MR MILLINGTON's second book is in no way a sequel to, or otherwise associated with, Things.
Now read this extract taken from page 16, line 28 to page 20, line 8 of the "trade papered-back."
"Haddock," I nodded.
"Aye," she replied, mistily, as if speaking under hypnosis. "A haddock omelette in chicken gravy... there's some spaghetti hoops too..."
Sara had a very promiscuous attitude towards food: what might be called an unusually inclusive meal gestalt. She didn't like everything ("Olives - bleugh!", for example), but if she did like it, then that was that. If she enjoyed ice cream and she enjoyed fried eggs, and they were both in the house, then it was as likely as not to be ice cream and fried eggs for lunch. Being a writer (even if only a ghost-writing hack of one) and therefore fatiguingly condemned by my nature to look for causes, influences and even - in moments of particular weakness - reasons for things, I would have been inclined to put this down to her job. She worked as a supervisor in a food shop. PolarCity: one of those big, chuck-it-out/sell-it-cheap places that sells mostly frozen food. For Sara, I would have mused - had I been writing her rather than living with her - food is simply a continuum that goes from the baskets near the entrance to the checkouts by the exit: put into sections only for the convenience of storage - it all goes into the same carrier bags in the end. That's what I would have said. That would have been neat. The trouble with this wry analysis as applied to real-world Sara - Sara out of the laboratory conditions of a narrative - is that it would be utter bollocks. Sara had been like this with food before she'd ever gone to work in PolarCity. She'd been like it ever since I'd known her.
When I'd met Sara she worked in an off-licence. She worked behind the counter at my off-licence and I'd see her when I went in to buy a packet of fags or a few cans of lager. I thought she was attractive, right from the very first time I saw her there. OK, so the person she replaced was a sullen, bird-eyed Glaswegian who'd had one hand moving disturbingly in his pocket on every single occasion I encountered him, but she'd have caught my notice favourably even without the comparison. She wasn't beautiful as defined by the stag-night consciousness of magazines like FHM or MAXIM, but had a kind of, well (don't laugh), a kind of allure. Charging down from her head like the Golden Horde was a boiling mass of ginger hair - yep, "ginger." I'm not going to resort to euphemisms here. I'm not going to drop my eyes and mumble something about Sara being "a redhead" or "flame-haired": she's ginger. Deal with it. In any case, the fact that she had ginger hair didn't jump out at me all that much. For a start, I was still only twenty-two and when you meet a woman at that age you don't think much about her being ginger; you're not remotely considering having children with her, after all. Also, I'd been living in Scotland for quite a while and there are so many ginger-haired people here that you become almost numb to it. Her skin was pale (some slight freckling, nothing disastrous) - almost bone white, in fact - and her frame heroin thin. Actually, I suppose she looked quite ill; but then I think, subconsciously, I find that kind of look appealing - it's probably the capital-"R" Romantic in me. The thing that struck me more than anything else, however, was her eyes. Pale blue, as clear and sparkling as the wineglass in a washing-up liquid advert and, even then, starting to line at the edges from smiling. Sara smiled all the time. She used to smile at me as I came into the shop, smile at me when I put the cans on the counter and smile at me when I said goodbye. Knowing smiles too, that was the thing. Her face smiled, but her eyes looked at me and knew, told me they knew. She'd smile as I gave her my money but her eyes would snag mine and say, "I know you looked at my arse when I turned round to get that packet of Marlboro off the shelf just then. You stared at the contours of my thin, soft dress and wondered if that was a thong I was wearing, or if my knickers had just really ridden up there; and you thought that, either way, it was a pretty good state of affairs as far as you were concerned. I know you thought that and, guess what? That's fine. I'm OK with it. In fact, I even find it amusing and cute in some kind of schoolboyish way. What do you think about that, eh?" It's powerful stuff when a pair of eyes puts you on the spot that way.
At first I tried to put a cordon around her. It was transference, surely? I associated her with lager and fags, that's why my heart picked up speed and my mouth slipped into an involuntary smile whenever I thought of her. Falling for the woman in the off-licence? How sad was that? Textbook pathetic: like becoming smitten with your nurse or your mother. No, hold on... not your mother. Whatever - you know what I mean. But it wouldn't go away. I found myself "forgetting" things. I'd "forget" to buy a box of matches, so I had to go back to the shop a second time. I'd suddenly decide at 10.30 at night that I needed to sprint over and get a single packet of crisps. Not because of her - no, simply owing to my sensing that my body wouldn't settle because it lacked salt. This madness continued for a while but things really became fatally unhinged when I found myself standing at the counter holding a bottle of dry white wine.
When she'd first started working in the shop I'd come in for a four-pack of lager produced by no one you've ever heard of - "Weinermeister: brewed under licence in a big shed in Doncaster," that kind of thing. I'd scan the stock, ignoring everything but the price labels and the alcohol content of each item, do a quick "cost divided by strength" calculation to work out the underlying Getting Pissed score of everything, and then go with whatever seemed most efficiently engineered. But then, one evening, as my fingers reached for the week's special offer, I happened to glance towards Sara and she, of course, smiled. My hand hovered uncertainly over the cans, then it reared up and began to rub my chin mendaciously: I was pretending to consider my choice based on more impressive criteria. "Mmmm... what would be an appropriate lager to accompany the lapin à la moutarde I'm having for dinner...?" And I picked up a four-pack of Carlsberg instead.
I'd crossed a line.
The next time I went in I bought McEwan's Export. Then Kronenbourg 1664, then just two cans of lager and a bottle (a bottle, mind - sophisticated) of Guinness, then... well, basically at the end of the road I wound up standing at the counter holding a bottle of fucking dry white wine. I was trying to convince the woman who worked in the off-licence that I was urbane and multi-layered using some sort of alcohol semaphore.
Then the final phase hit me: I lost the ability to speak. Good job, you might think, when the only place left for me to go by this stage would have been to ask whether she perhaps had this wine in a "carafe." But, sadly, I don't mean that I went mute, just that I abandoned words in favour of making more or less random noises with my mouth.
