Vulgar Things
The second novel from Lee Rourke, author of the cult hit ‘The Canal’.Jon Michaels – a divorced, disaffected and fatigued editor living a nondescript life in North London – wakes one morning to a phone call informing him that his uncle has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Dismissed from his job only the day before and hung-over, Jon reluctantly agrees to sort through his uncle’s belongings and clear out the caravan. What follows is a quixotic week on Canvey as Jon, led on by desire and delusion, purposeful but increasingly disorientated, unfolds a disturbing secret, ever more enchanted by the island – its landscape and its atmosphere.Haunted and haunting, ‘Vulgar Things’ is part mystery, part romance, part odyssey: a novel in which the menial entrances and the banal compels.
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Lee Rourke 2014
Lee Rourke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007542512
Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007542529
Version: 2015-06-03
‘Sad, lost men looking for maps in the starry Essex sky, small-town strippers, absent mothers, angry brothers, planets photographed on smart phones, cider and a lot of rare steak – Rourke is on his way to becoming the J. G. Ballard of Southend-on-Sea’
Deborah Levy
‘A consistently disturbing yet compelling vision of loss, violence and identity, Vulgar Things stalks the reader’s memory long after the last page. A novel of innovation and resonance, it is as bleak and as beautiful as a deserted coastline’
Stuart Evers
For Wilko Johnson
My mind shudders recounting.
Virgil: The Aeneid
CONTENTS
Maybe Someone is Wondering Just What I’m Doing Here
Look at them both sitting at their desks, feigning important business. What do they think they’re doing with their lives? What are they hoping to achieve, acting the way they do, alienating everyone else in the office? I’ve asked myself many, many times: What am I doing here? I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that I’ve more or less chosen the wrong path in life. Not that I have any idea what the correct path might be. I look at what my life, until now, has amounted to: a boring job, a failed marriage, a small flat I can barely afford, and each working day the same agonising prospect of these two loathsome cretins, sitting at their desks, constantly talking to one another. It sickens me. To be honest, I don’t think I have the strength for it any more.
lunch hour
Jessica, the younger of the two and my line manager, had taken me to one side in the company kitchen earlier that week. Her words had been rattling around my head ever since, delivered, as they were, in her usual pseudo-flirtatious manner: ‘What’s wrong with you these days? Have you been having trouble at home again?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Have you been having trouble at home, you poor dear? I know things didn’t work out for you last year … your marriage … I’m genuinely worried for you. Is that why you’ve been letting things slip here?’
‘Slip?’
‘Your journals, some haven’t met cover month, when you said they would. Editors have been complaining, plus those suppliers’ invoices haven’t been sent that I asked you to send last week.’
‘Oh, those … I’ll send them today …’
‘Are your journals even on schedule?’
‘Yes, of course they are. I might not have hit cover month on a couple, but everything else I publish is published on schedule, on time and to budget, you know that.’
‘Jon, you know … I only ask you this because I actually care … It’s just that, things are slipping, people’s confidence in you has started to drop … We’re thinking of taking some journals from your list …’
‘What!?’
‘Just a couple … Maybe IBD and VVA … Nothing’s concrete yet, just to ease the pressure you must be feeling, you know … It’ll help ease your schedule … and if, you know, if there are problems outside here, this should ease the stress levels, too …’
‘Jessica, there are no problems outside here … and I’m not stressed …’
‘Well, you sound stressed …’
‘You’ve just told me you’re taking journals away from me, depleting my list … of course I’m going to sound concerned …’
‘Jon, I know you can pull through all this, it’s just a phase … a bad patch. I know you can get through this.’
‘Jessica … there’s no …’
‘Oh, I didn’t say … You’re still on for my engagement drinkies this weekend, yes? Blacks of course …’
‘…’
My time is up. Publishing is nothing to me. To be honest, I don’t even remember how I fell into this profession in the first place. I’m a good editor, I think, but the job bores me to tears. It must have been some kind of accident, some heinous sleight of hand – something that happened when I was looking the other way.
