Read our exclusive extract of the author David Nicholls's new book (2024)

In yesterday’s extract from One Day author David Nicholls’ new novel, You Are Here, Marnie, a 38-year-old book copy editor, wondered how she had ended up feeling quite so lonely.

Meanwhile, Michael, a reclusive geography teacher and recent divorcé, was reluctantly persuaded to go on a group walking holiday – but could a chance encounter on a train change everything?

The Slideshow

She had become addicted to the buzz of the cancelled plan. It was a small and fleeting high and no one would ever look back fondly at all the times they’d managed to get out of something, but for the moment no words were sweeter to Marnie than ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make it’. It was like being let off an exam that she expected to fail.

Ideally, the other person would cancel first, but she was quite prepared to take the initiative. Like an actor in an emotional scene, it helped if she could draw on some personal truth, so that when she woke on the morning of New Year’s Eve – most terrible day – with a tingle at the back of her throat, her first thought was ‘I can use this’.

Her friend Cleo, the deputy head of a secondary school in York, had invited her to a party but it would be irresponsible to travel – she’d be no fun, it was a long way, she was going to stay in, sweat it out. She lay on the sofa to give a bed-bound quality to the voice, the sticky croak of a child possessed by demons, and made the call.

‘I knew this would happen,’ said Cleo. ‘I knew it.’

‘You knew I’d get ill?’

‘We can all do the voice, Marnie.’

‘I have a temperature!’

‘A normal temperature.’

‘I’m shivering, I’m . . . Why would you want me if I’m not going to be fun?’

‘We don’t invite you because you’re fun.’

‘Oh.’

‘We invite you because we love you and it’s important to see people. You spend too much time alone.’

‘It’s not my fault if—’

‘Sat there like . . . Eleanor f***-ing Rigby.’

‘Cleo!’

‘Sorry, but I really wanted to see you. Anthony too.’ Anthony was Marnie’s godson, someone else she’d neglected.

‘I want to see him too, and you. I just want to be at my best.’

‘You don’t have to be at your best. No one’s interested in you being at your best. We want you exactly as you are.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Isn’t it? I might throw up.’

‘Me too,’ said Marnie. ‘And that’s why I can’t come.’

‘All right. Happy New Year, I suppose.’ She was gone, and now the room seemed very quiet. She loved Cleo, a good and constant friend, fiercely loyal but also fierce, and while it was humiliating to be told off, she knew this feeling would pass, replaced by immense relief. She ran a bath and opened wine. She drafted several humorous posts about her wild night in for social media, but she’d found in the past that the jokes she made online led to messages asking if she was okay. Instead, she lurked and read her feed and felt as if she was looking up at a party from beneath a lamppost.

So deep was her commitment to the fake illness that it soon turned into the real thing, a feeling that the back of her throat was somehow chipped, a sweetly metallic taste, a whole-body ache. The pleasure of cancelled plans depended on the belief that she was having a better time than the fools who’d made an effort, and that was no longer the case. She toasted herself with a pint of water, swallowed two paracetamol and a sleeping pill and, at ten fifteen pm, squeezed beneath the weighted blanket that turned her bed into a giant flower-press.

At midnight, all the fireworks of London came punching through her sleep and the first hours of the new year were spent in a fevered haze, imagining where she might be if she’d chosen yes over another no. In a branching timeline, she imagined herself in the corner of Cleo’s kitchen, being animated and funny with a nice-looking man, his dark eyes crinkling, his teeth less than perfect and all the better for it. Shall we step outside? he’d say. It’s too bright, and maybe they’d scrounge a cigarette, share it in some corny way. What time’s your train tomorrow? he’d ask. I don’t have to rush back, she’d say (although it was an advance ticket, not a flexible one, and even in the fantasy, she worried about the cost). So, she’d ask, how do you become a tree surgeon? and here he’d lean in to kiss her.

The trouble with alternative timelines was that they really were full of the most mortifying nonsense. Back in the universe she’d chosen for herself, the alarm clock read two fifteen and she chiselled her feverish body into the cool side of the bed. In a documentary on the emergency services, she’d heard the story of an old man who had died with the electric blanket on, simmering gently over the course of several days. What might her weighted blanket do over time? Press her flat, splayed like an Archaeopteryx? Would a fireman roll her up, like her yoga mat, carry her out beneath his arm?

On New Year’s Day, shivering on the sofa, she turned on the TV to find that her streaming device had compiled a sarcastic slideshow of her photographs, entitled What A Year!: her oven light-bulb, a recipe for hearty lentil soup, a close-up of an ingrowing hair, her National Insurance number, the flapping sole of a faulty shoe, the mole on her shoulder, a gas-meter reading, a dry-cleaning receipt, the shard of green glass she’d found in a salad, then back to the oven light-bulb, all accompanied Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’.

A resolution. This year the photographs would be different. There’d be no more self-willed illness, no more cosiness, no candles sucking the oxygen from the room, no more relentless self-care. Instead she’d care for others, revive her friendships and make new ones, engage in the messy, confusing business of other people.

Resolutions fade with time but this one lingered, and when Cleo phoned with a new invitation Marnie hesitated, suspended between the desire for change and the need for everything to stay the same. Three days of walking with strangers. It was the kind of potentially awful experience she needed and, in her mind, she decided to give it some thought. In the real world, out slipped ‘Yes’.

The Wigan Orgy

IT WAS a shame not to depart from a more romantic station, the graceful curve of Waterloo, the great glass vaults of King’s Cross and Paddington, the black-and-white matinée of Marylebone. But travel to the north-west meant the doomy black box of Euston, a building whose exterior is somehow disguised – no lifelong Londoner can draw a picture of it – as is its function, the trains departing furtively from a back room. Even on a bright, crisp April morning, it felt gloomy and dystopian, her fancy-dress costume now absurd, the sports bra a tourniquet, the thermals deployed far too soon, forty litres of clothing tugging at her back so that she thought she might pass out in the queue for coffee, roll backwards on to her pack, arms and legs waving uselessly, a beetle in a shoebox.

She felt better on the train, the first of the day, claiming her forward-facing window-seat with table: the dream. Now she was an executive, laying out her laptop, pen and notepad, charging her devices unnecessarily, because this was the key to surviving in the wild, charging devices and using a toilet whenever the chance arose. She laid out her ancient copy of Wuthering Heights, which she’d brought to get in the mood, and now the train crawled out into the light, emerging behind the terraces of Mornington Crescent, an address that still retained an atmosphere of old kitchen-sink films, sad, shabby love stories, the kind she’d aspired to when she’d first moved to the city. She saw closed shutters and grimy curtains, imagined new lovers slumbering in rented rooms. Then, above the terraces, came a knife of brilliant blue and she felt sorry for anyone who was still in bed.

City faded into suburb. She saw gasometers, horses in a stable-yard, dog-walkers on a frosty recreation ground, articulated lorries on the ring roads, everyone going about their business, as in a Richard Scarry book. She’d become so used to the view from her kitchen table, the short lens of London life. Now England was a model village blown up to life-size. Look, canal boats! A recycling plant! A wind-farm! Infrastructure, was that the word? The suburbs faded and stagey swirls of mist lingered in the dips and hollows. Wild cows! She was observing the hell out of things, remembering the power of a train journey to turn life into montage, a sequence conveying change. Why hadn’t she done this before? What had she been so scared of? Would she care for anything on the trolley? She would care for everything.

She’d agreed to come along for three nights, the first leg of the Coast to Coast, which was apparently some big deal. It seemed feeble just to be doing the one coast but even if she hated it, if they didn’t get on or ran out of things to say, surely she could survive for three nights. She’d see the Atlantic and some of those famous Lakes, then sprint back from Penrith on Tuesday, and in the afternoons, she would find a quiet spot and work, because all of this adventure would need to be paid for.

She opened up the new assignment. Twisted Night was the sequel to the highly successful erotic thriller Dark Night, which took the lid off the glamorous, shocking world of Hollywood’s private sex clubs. ‘Very spicy,’ said the editor, ‘but possibly written a little too quickly.’ Even the title seemed to demand a margin note, because a night might be hard or hot or endless but in what sense could it be twisted?

She soon found out. The opening orgy alone took her through the Chilterns to the West Midlands and Marnie had never felt more grateful for the empty seat beside her. So disorienting was the action that she had to make notes on her napkin to establish everyone’s whereabouts, a complex web of arrows and initials, like a diagram of the Battle of Austerlitz. Was S on top of B now or behind and, if so, where did that put L and what was in her hand? A vibrator hopped from left to right to left, like a nightclub singer’s microphone, and the author alternated ‘PVC’ and ‘latex’ as if they were synonyms. Marnie was pretty sure they were not, though when she searched on the train’s Wi-Fi she was told that latex PVC was a forbidden term.

She deleted her search history and would fact-check later. In the meantime there was plenty to be getting on with, not least the wild punctuation, the commas scattered like rose petals, the yelp of exclamation marks, paragraph-length sentences that gave the text a kind of hallucinatory, high-modernist intensity. Marnie had not attended an orgy, though she had copy-edited many, and while this was not the same thing, she couldn’t deny the author’s skill in conveying a sense of disorientation and sex-panic, so that you really couldn’t tell who was doing what to who, or ‘to whom’, or ‘to who what was being done by whom’. An orgy was like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time, except the head and stomach belonged to other people and it wasn’t their head and stomach. Was it S’s hot tongue on L’s salty skin or B’s sharp nipple in L’s soft mouth, and was ‘sharp’ really the right word?

As a civilian reader she might, she supposed, be turned on by all this, sleazy and facile though it was, but a certain professional distance was required and so she worked on methodically, wondering if anyone’s sex really did taste of the ocean and, if so, was this a good thing? Maybe it was a question of which ocean. No one wanted to taste of the English Channel.

Marnie sipped her tea. She had not shared a bed with anyone for – oh, God, terrible arithmetic – six years now. She knew that this was not unusual and that celibacy was a perfectly acceptable choice, but when she’d tested the statistic on Cleo, she’d simply said, ‘Yikes.’ Her friend had always carried an aura of sexual confidence, a kind of heavy-lidded, tousled air, never boasting exactly but hinting at her satisfaction in ‘that department’. Marnie had tried not to resent this but that ‘Yikes’ had stung. It’s like driving on a motorway, she’d told Marnie. You can’t avoid it for too long or it becomes frightening, and Marnie had felt another little twist of resentment because she’d always liked driving on the motorway, had been complimented on her driving, would like to drive on the motorway again. Even marriage had not cured her of that.

But it seemed unlikely on this holiday. Whether it was the fresh air or the paraphernalia of wipe-clean trousers and cling-filmed cheese rolls, there was something powerfully anti-aphrodisiac about the English countryside. The smell of wet wool and an unwashed Thermos flask, the taste of boiled sweets . . . no, sex belonged in cities. In Los Angeles, for instance, they’d been at it for three hundred miles now and she longed for someone, anyone, to org*sm so that she could look out of the window. But on it went, page after page, through Warrington, Wigan and Preston. She had a headache. Would someone please just fake it? By Lancaster, the words were beginning to lose their meaning. At Oxenholme, she typed the note ‘close repetition of “co*ck’’’, saved the file, then looked up.

It seemed they’d crossed the border into another country, all purple and sage green, and off to the left she could see – this was not the right word – lumps, less than a mountain, more than a hill, each rising abruptly, like a child’s drawing of a volcano. Somewhere beyond those hills was the Irish Sea, which meant she’d have to traverse this landscape to catch her train back. She reached for her books, A Pictorial Guide to the Western Fells and The Central Fells by Alfred Wainwright, facsimiles of the old editions, the text hand-written, the prose fine and sturdy as a dry-stone wall, the illustrations densely cross-hatched, lovely but as gloomy as a walking map of Mordor. She laughed at the notion that these might ever help her find her way. Opening a page at random she began to read but the Hollywood orgy lingered.

She gave up on Alfred Wainwright. Silly to lug them around, a rural prop of no more practical use to her than the briar pipe the author chewed in his photo. She looked back to the window, hoping to spot a lake through the trees in the same way you might spot a giraffe on safari, suppressing a sacrilegious thought that, while the view was lovely, she’d got the idea. Penrith shortly, then Carlisle, where she was due to change trains then curl back south along the Cumbrian coast. The dawn start was catching up with her. She closed her eyes and dreamt of clear forest streams, lofty parapets of granite, red squirrels in their high heels with their hot, soft mouths.

A Connection

IT WAS easy to spot the Londoners, their clothes too new, too bright, worn in too many layers, boots fresh from the box, neither properly seasoned nor broken in. Waiting on the local platform at Carlisle, they had a wide-eyed look, pioneers venturing bravely north. The train opened its doors to let them on, two carriages only, and Michael waited patiently behind a woman with a rucksack the same size as her torso, the straps too long so that the weight tugged her backwards. He thought for a moment about advising her.

But he must not teach. He would be travelling with adults who had no need or desire to learn about drumlins and moraines. The train ticked and hummed, then began to crawl, rattling past sooty Victorian buildings, warehouses, the new light industry at the edge of town, the sky widening like a cinema screen, opening on to farm and woodland. Seated diagonally across the aisle, the woman with the poorly fitted rucksack was typing noisily but without a table, so that the laptop kept slipping down her new trousers towards her new boots. What was so important that it should take precedence over the view? She was certainly making a big show of it, tutting and blowing up at her fringe. It was a nice face, amused and amusing, attractive and expressive, with a city haircut (was it a ‘bob’? He wanted to call it a ‘bob’) and more make-up than you’d expect on a walker, sometimes rolling her eyes or clapping her hand to her flushed cheek at the words on the screen. He noticed that she was perspiring slightly. Noticed, too, that he’d stopped looking at the view.

But he must not stare at strangers on trains and he must not play the Lakeland poet either, though there was a kind of poetry to the towns they were passing through now: Wigton, Aspatria, Maryport, Flimby. Look, look up, he wanted to tell her, though in truth the landscape was not yet beautiful, at least not to a tourist, a belt of old industry between mountain and coast, small towns exhausted by winter, exposed terraced houses that seemed to regret their sea view. As they curved around towards Workington the Solway Firth appeared, a great slab of polished pewter with Scotland beyond, and still she shook her head at the screen, her hand a visor, one eye clenched shut as if she couldn’t bear to look. If it was causing her so much pain, why was she still reading?

Now the train was hugging the black cliffs, the sea some distance below. They entered a tunnel, long and sinister, then back into the light at Corkickle, where they both began to gather their belongings. Wary of the dawn start, the others had driven on ahead and were all staying overnight at a hotel in St Bees. They would meet on the beach at the start of the walk, seven of them. Cleo and her husband Sam were bringing their son Anthony who, they insisted, could handle it. Sam was bringing an old friend from London, Cleo two old friends. ‘Female but don’t worry,’ she had told him, as if this were a phobia. He did not have a phobia, it was just...

He’d read somewhere that people found it easier to talk frankly when walking, something about the forward gaze and the rhythm. He’d have to watch out for that. Not too open, not too reserved, not the teacher or the poet or the northerner or the grizzled old man of the mountains; not too judgemental, because all boots were new boots at some time or another.

As to which role he should assume, well, he wasn’t sure. Cleo had told him just be yourself by which she meant be your former self and that was no longer possible. So much of his social life had been led by Nat and he’d yet to work out how to perform as a solo act. He would do his best to appear cheerful, and if he could keep that up for two days, he would be on his own again, unobserved and therefore invisible, racing to the North Sea. At nearly two hundred miles, the Coast to Coast was the furthest he’d ever walked and his pack, as he heaved it on to his back, felt impossibly heavy. He’d get used to it, he had no choice, and in nine days he’d be the other side of England, aching, browned by spring sunshine, everything thought through and resolved. ‘Walking it off’, that was the phrase, and though it was more usually applied to indigestion or rage, it was worth a try.

The train pulled into St Bees station, red brick and wood, like something from a model railway. He let the woman descend, so that she might go ahead.

But on the platform she was looking at the town map quite unnecessarily, blocking his way. The sea’s right there. Just point yourself at the sea.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s this way.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said, a little prickly. ‘Thank you.’

It would be embarrassing to fall into step with a stranger and he accelerated past her. ‘Good luck,’ he said, but without looking back and, in turn, she didn’t reply.

Extracted from You Are Here by David Nicholls, to be published on April 23 by Sceptre, £20. © David Nicholls 2024. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 27/04/24; UK P&P valid on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.