Bright Young Things Read Online Free PDF

Sunday supplements and a couple of newspapers on the table. Thea picks up the last Monday’s
Guardian
and opens it to the job section.
    By the time Thea leaves the nursing home it’s gone eight. That means there’s only a couple of hours before Leisure 2000 shuts. This is the arcade in which Thea has spent all of her free time since she finished university. She used to hang around in here sometimes as a child, addicted to Space Invaders. Now she’ll shoot anything that moves, fly anything that flies and stalk dinosaurs until the arcade closes. She loves the hazy hours away from everything; they feel stolen, and therefore delicious. It’s like the feeling of having a big jar of sweets and being able to eat them all, or perhaps the feeling you get before you have bad sex. You know you’ll feel sick afterwards, but it doesn’t stop you doing it. The thing is, as long as Thea’s sitting in a miniature cockpit or standing behind a big gun, she’s not making films, and although it makes her hate herself, she can’t really help it. It’s all the fault of that Cardiff MA admission person.
    The thing is, until the Cardiff interview, Thea had never failed at anything in her entire life. She was one of those ten-grade-A GCSE girls, whose picture appeared in the local paper alongside snaps of Abby and Nicky, school friends she doesn’t see any more. After GCSEs, Thea stayed at the girls’ grammar school she already attended and took three A levels. She got two As and a U. The U was contested and later Thea was given a third A. By that time it was too late to take up the university place she’d been offered, so she went travelling for a few months. Then, eventually, she did do the course she wanted, with most of her classmates a year younger than her and lacking any of the experience she’d gained from travelling. When she returned from university with VD and a First, she had nothing to do for the summer except sit in the arcade and play games. She even succeeded at the games she played; that was part of their allure. She always took top score, always finished right to the credits.
    Cardiff was the only thing she ever failed. The MA was full by the time she applied.

Bryn
     
    The
Guardian
is on the dashboard of the MG, along with the
Sun
, the
Daily Mail
and
Loot
. The guy behind the wheel doesn’t touch them, doesn’t move, because if he moves he will be seen. He can’t be seen. He smokes slowly, his arm propped on the window frame. The car smells sweet with skunk weed, smoke melting out of the open window.
    Number 37 looks quiet today, like yesterday, but she’s got to come out some time, right? Doesn’t she need milk, or fags, or whatever? Bryn could do without this today, but Tank needs his cash this afternoon. Jesus. It shouldn’t be this fucking difficult. Wait for her to come our snap, snap, snap, and go home. Out of this gyppo council estate.
    The radio’s on low, playing a remix of Inner City’s
Good Life
. The tune lifts in the wrong place and goes all Latino. The original never did that. Bryn presses the button for the local station. An old Whitney Houston tune. Sorted.
    The early August sun trips in the window, hotter than yesterday. Whitney’s singing about her married lover, about waiting for him to come round and fuck her. Outside the car a couple of blokes from the pub walk past, then Tank’s mate Gilbert, on his own with his kid. He’s probably had his kid down the pub again, giving it blowbacks in the garden to send it to sleep. Someone should tell Social Services, but they never will. Around here, child abuse is a conspiracy. Everyone does it. You don’t tell.
    Bryn looks away. Gilbert’s the local fuck-up. He got put into care when he was twelve after getting in with a local paedophile ring, giving the old men blow-jobs for Mars Bars. All the other kids called him Cadbury, old enough to make up the nickname, but too young to bother with the fact that Cadbury never made Mars Bars. At fifteen,