Luke Kennard - The Transition

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright © Luke Kennard 2017

Cover design by Jonathan Pelham

The right of Luke Kennard to be identified as the author of this 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

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities 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: 9780008200428

Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008200442

Version: 2017-07-20

For Zoë

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

WHENEVER KARL TEMPERLEY felt that he couldn’t endure another moment he would imagine that he had just run over and killed a child. The shock of the impact, the screech of his too-late emergency stop, the tiny body in the gutter, a parent – sometimes the mother, sometimes the father – running towards him as he stood by the bloodied bonnet of his wife’s Fiat Punto. This imagined, he returned to his real world and its trivial sorrows with relief and gratitude.

‘… your marital status notwithstanding …’ the notary public was saying.

Lately though, facing fifteen months in jail for fraud and a tax infraction he still couldn’t quite fathom – neither what he had done or neglected to do, nor how exactly he had accomplished or overlooked it – he found himself spending longer and longer at his inner roadside.

Karl Temperley wrote consumer reviews of products he had never used and bespoke school and undergraduate essays as ‘study aids’ for ten pence a word. It was a lowly portfolio career, but such was his determination to do something literary with his education: he had read English and taken a Master’s degree in the Metaphysical Poets. It had cost him £78,000, an amount which seemed impossible and therefore easy to ignore.

His employers were email addresses who signed off with different names, but their tone was warm and jovial enough and he was well thought of – of this they assured him – for his ability to write essentially the same thing as if it were being said by ten different people. Where some saw a carbon-fibre laptop case, Karl saw a Russian novel.

His wife, Genevieve, taught at a local primary school. An enviable demographic once known as Double Income No Kids and yet, once the rent and bills were paid, their debts serviced, Karl found that he had to think twice about buying a pair of shoes when his old ones wore through at the sole. The rent kept going up. He was aware they brought some of this on themselves; they had expectations. Every day they drank flavoured coffees the size of poster tubes, which cost as much as the baristas serving them would earn in an hour. They loaded supermarket trolleys with snacks and treats which could largely be consumed on the way home. In the last week of every month they were inevitably down to the wire, so he would put a week’s shopping on his credit card. Then a return train fare. The pair of shoes he needed. A birthday present for Genevieve. Dinner. The bank was happy to increase his credit limit, increase it again and, instead of increasing it a third time, to offer him a temporary loan to consolidate his debt, so that the double-capacity credit card went back to a tantalising £0.00. Karl decided he might start taking advantage of the daily invitations to take out more credit cards, credit cards with banks he hadn’t even heard of, cards in every colour of the spectrum, cards with limits of £300 which he could use for small purchases, cards with limits of £5,000 with which he could chivalrously pay for a new head gasket when Genevieve’s car got into trouble and, the following week, take her on a five-star mini-break to Paris when she turned thirty-two (her thirtieth had been marred by a minor psychotic episode, and her thirty-first was not much better, so he felt the need to compensate). Finally, there was one beautiful, transparent credit card which shimmered like a puddle of petrol and had a limit of £11,000. He used it to pay off some of the smaller credit cards and make the minimum monthly payment on the middle-sized ones. Whenever this one needed servicing he would take out another bantamweight card or a short-term advance.

Genevieve knew nothing of his seventeen-card private Ponzi scheme. As far as she could see, both she and Karl worked damn hard all week then collapsed, exhausted, and spent all weekend either asleep or streaming complete seasons of American dramas to get back to full strength. Whenever they had some time off they both came down with head colds. It never occurred to her that they might be living beyond their means and it took three years for Karl to finally max out his most copious line of credit, the rat queen of his nest of cards. After that, letters printed in red ink started to arrive. Statements with lateness penalties, interest on the lateness penalties, penalties for exceeding the credit limit and lateness penalties on those penalties, punitive rates of interest and demands for final settlement. The double dose of sleeping pills he was taking with a tumbler of mid-priced brandy to silence the grinding gears of his incipient ruination stopped working. He was getting crotchety with Genevieve and it was upsetting her. His very raison d’être was to not upset Genevieve; it was, so he told himself, the reason he’d got into so much debt in the first place and yet it had led to him upsetting her anyway.

Maybe I should kill myself? he thought, looking at his face in the communal bathroom mirror one winter morning, his cheeks covered in shaving foam. He pressed the five-blade Ultra Smooth Advanced Wet Shave System safety razor to his left wrist and shaved a Parmesan-thin centimetre of flesh. Blood appeared like a watermark. It really, really stung. Maybe not . He put his watch on over the top of it.