Start reading Small Hours by Bobby Palmer

Dive into Small Hours by the critically acclaimed author of Isaac and the Egg, Bobby Palmer.

To Jack Penwick’s logical brain, his career had been like a computer game. Everything was laid out in levels to be completed, with high scores to be achieved if he only worked hard enough. Jack was a numbers guy, and nothing had ever added up so easily. For the best part of the last fifteen years, he had progressed diligently from stage to stage. In his late teens, while his schoolmates deferred university places and planned gap years, he landed work experience in the city with their uncles and godfathers. He got himself on a good course at a good university, scored an even better placement in his third year, beat out competition for the best graduate scheme going when graduation came around. Finance felt like a calling, the ultimate equation to be solved. But as the numbers grew bigger, the levels got harder. And as the hours got longer, the friendly faces became fewer and further between. If it became more difficult to come up for air, to look around and wonder what he actually wanted – and if this was actually it – then that email from Hugh a couple of years ago came at just the right moment to stick a plaster over the opening wound. Jack and Hugh had known each other since university. Now, with Hugh’s contacts and the financial backing of his friend Hugo’s father, they were starting their own business. They shook his hand. They offered him equity. They showed him the numbers, and the numbers looked good. When they told him that the company was going to be a unicorn, Jack had swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Like a fish. 

Jack now sat beneath a tree, on a bench on the common, unsure exactly how he’d ended up there. Leaving the office had been like stumbling, bloodied, from a battlefield, P45s billowing out of printers and shreds of sensitive documents raining from roaring shredders. He remembered, of course, that he’d been on the pavement outside his office, then on a bus. He’d disembarked at his usual stop, taken the usual, direct route home across the common. But his memory of these events – and the mechanics of how they led here, to this particular bench – were hazy. He supposed he’d needed a rest. He supposed there wasn’t much point going any further. Jack had no one to come home to, no one to tell. And the spacious two-floor flat which had once been a towering monument to his sizeable earnings already seemed like a gaping void into which he was throwing an income he no longer had. 

It was game over. How had Jack not seen this coming? And even if he’d had an inkling, how had he not been smart enough to stop it? He’d thought of himself as a startup Svengali, a Doctor Dolittle for the age of digital disruptors. He might not have been the boss, but he’d thought he had a handle on things. He’d at least assumed there would be more conversations before that one, the final one. He reflected on the open-plan loft office that had cost four times what the company could afford, the ingoings and outgoings that were uneven, even to him, the guy who was supposed to make it all add up. Hugh and Hugo never listened. They fobbed him off with the same things they said to all the app developers, to the event organisers, to the angel investors with deep pockets and short attention spans. Don’t focus on the numbers. Focus on the feeling.

Jack didn’t feel good. From the glances he was getting, he looked even worse. His hair had become lank in the heat, his exhausted eyes ringed by welts of purple. His face was stuck in a grimace, though that wasn’t just a today problem. Jack had spent £4,000 having his teeth whitened and straightened a couple of years ago, and for what? Smiling still didn’t come naturally. He massaged his jaw, catching the concerned eye of a woman pushing a toddler in a pram. Jack looked down at the box he was clutching. It had been the only empty  container left in the almost-empty office, one last humiliation on his way out. A huge, gold-ribbon-wrapped
gift box, now filled with the sparse remnants of his former life. A notebook, a laptop, a vape pen. One phone charger, one vape charger, one laptop charger. One charging case, containing one pair of wireless headphones. One small desk plant, proven to boost office productivity. One small bottle of CBD drops, proven to reduce work stress. The woman with the pram was smiling, now. She probably thought it was his birthday.

Jack scowled, then opened the box and took out his vape, which he inhaled from as if it were an oxygen supply. As steam billowed from his nostrils, he surveyed his surroundings. The lunchtime sunbathers with their picnic blankets had moved on, leaving only a few stragglers. A couple of teenagers were snogging on the next bench along. A greyhound zipped back and forth across the dry grass, chasing squirrels it never managed to catch. Jack thought of the brown envelope in the box, of what might be inside. He didn’t know what he’d do without a job. He didn’t know how he’d cope, who he should call. His family had never understood the importance of his work, and he’d never been much good at maintaining friendships. Above his head, a pair of bright green parakeets leapt from a branch and took flight over the common. Jack thought about crying. He’d never been much good at that, either. 

Jack’s shoulders were rigid, his upper lip stiff as ever. But as he sat on the bench and stared out across a hazy expanse of yellowing grass, he felt something begin to give. It started with a jiggle in his left leg, then a slight twitch in his right eyelid. Then, pain, both physical and metaphysical. He clenched his fists, clenched his jaw, rocked slightly back and then slightly forth. He wondered if it might be a migraine. He’d been plagued by them all his adult life. It felt like there was always one hiding in his peripheral vision, crouching just out of sight behind his eyes. They seemed to creep up on him from nowhere. He could pinpoint all of the triggers: screens, stress, screens, too much socialising, too many screens. Was it normal to always feel this tired? To be thirty-three years old and exhausted in every bone in one’s body, at every hour of every day? Creatine was a plaster, caffeine a crutch. And though Jack kept himself going with six black coffees a day, he was really surviving on adrenaline alone. When a migraine did finally break against the walls of his brain, all he could do was crawl to his bedroom, close the blinds and ride the crashing wave with his head under a pillow.

He wanted to crawl there now, back to his bed, and envelope himself in darkness. He closed his eyes, tried to shut out the ever-familiar nausea and that excruciating pain that seemed to slice like a cleaver through his cranium. This time, there was a noise attached to the pain. Something tinny. Not the wheeze of distant traffic or the squeal of playing children, but a scratch, a scrape, a high-pitched, hollow moan. Like the sound of an old radio, tuning in. 

Jack rubbed his eyes, then the back of his taut neck. He thought of his empty bed, in his flat on the other side of the common. He thought of Hugh and Hugo, back in the office on the other side of a glass table. And as he sat there on the bench, plagued by that awful sound scraping itself along the back wall of his skull, the still-functioning part of Jack’s brain beat against the confines of his throbbing head. He held on to his seat as if he were battling seasickness, tried to find a fixed point on the horizon. To focus on something, anything. There, in the distance. Something moving, slowly, across the grass. Jack steadied his breathing, felt some of the tension dissipate. It was a dog, he thought. But then, it didn’t seem to have an owner. And it wasn’t moving like any dog he’d seen before. His heartbeat picked up again. The dog-like creature was limping, loping. Jack leaned forward, frowning. There were two black dots behind it, jumping about, not leaving it alone. With his eyes almost closed, the creature looked like a lit match, a tiny sun with two black planets in its orbit. With his eyes wide open, it looked like what it really was. A fox. An injured fox. A half-dead fox, stalked by crows.