Free One Day by David Nicholls

conducted on Thames embankments. She had intended to form a band, make short films, write novels, but two years on the slim volume of verse was no fatter, and nothing really good had happened to her since she’d been baton-charged at the Poll Tax Riots.
    The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no-one had noticed her arrival, and no-one would notice if she left.
    It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. The idea of a career in publishing had floated itself. Her friend Stephanie Shaw had got a job on graduation, and it had transformed her. No more pints of lager and black for Stephanie Shaw. These days she drank white wine, wore neat little suits from Jigsaw and handed out Kettle Chips at dinner parties. On Stephanie’s advice Emma had written letters to publishers, to agents, then to bookshops, but nothing. There was a recession on and people were clinging to their jobs with grim determination. She thought about taking refuge in education, but the government had ended student grants, and there was no way she could afford the fees. There was voluntary work, for Amnesty International perhaps, but rent and travel ate up all her money, Loco Caliente ate up all her time and energy. She had a fanciful notion that she might read novels aloud to blind people, but was this an actual job, or just something that she’d seen in a film? When she had the energy, she would find out. For now she would sit at the table and glare at her lunch.
    The industrial cheese had set solid like plastic, and in sudden disgust Emma pushed it away and reached into her bag, pulling out an expensive new black leather notebook with a stubby fountain pen clipped to the cover. Turning to a fresh new page of creamy white paper, she quickly began to write.
    Nachos
    It was the nachos that did it
.
    The steaming variegated mess like the mess of her life
    Summing up all that was wrong
    With
    Her
    Life
.
    ‘Time for change’ comes the voice from the street
.
    Outside on the Kentish Town Road
    There is laughter
    But here, in the smoky attic room
    There are only
    The Nachos
.
    Cheese, like life, has become
    Hard and
    Cold
    Like Plastic
    And there is no laughter in the high room
.
     
    Emma stopped writing, then looked away and stared at the ceiling, as if giving someone a chance to hide. She looked back at the page in the hope of being surprised by the brilliance of what was there.
    She shuddered and gave a long groan, then laughed, shaking her head as she methodically scratched out each line, cross-hatching on top of this until each word was obliterated. Soon there was so much ink that it had soaked through the paper. She turned back a page to where the blots had seeped through and glanced at what was written there.
    Edinburgh morning, 4 a.m.
    We lie in the single bed and talk about the

Future, make our guesses

and as he speaks I look at him, think

‘Handsome’, stupid word, and think

‘might this be it? The elusive thing?’

Blackbirds sing outside and the

Sunlight warms the curtains …
     
    Once more she shuddered, as if peeking beneath a bandage, and snapped the notebook shut. Good God, ‘the elusive thing’. She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.
    Putting the notebook away, she reached for yesterday’s
Sunday Mirror
instead and began to eat the nachos, the elusive nachos, surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.
    Ian was in the doorway. ‘That guy’s here again.’
    ‘What guy?’
    ‘Your friend, the handsome one. He’s got some girl with him.’ And immediately Emma knew which guy Ian was talking about.
    She watched them from the kitchen, nose pressed against the greasy glass of the circular window as they slumped insolently in a central booth, sipping gaudy drinks and laughing at the menu. The girl was long and slim with pale skin, black eye make-up and black, black hair, cut short and