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especially, and we all toasted his success.
    ' I don't know why you make it seem so difficult Alice', he said to me afterwards. 'There's nothing to it really.'
    ' No', I said, defeated. 'I guess not.'
    ' Perhaps writing's not really your thing after all. I mean you've given it a shot haven't you? There's no reason to feel bad about giving up on something that's not working. I mean you did that with Harry after all, and the one before him, Mark was it?' dad said. He continued to talk, but by that point I'd given up listening.
    The rest of the lunch went the usual way it did, and I left feeling even lower than I had when I'd arrived. My family seemed to have an uncanny ability to make that happen. To make me feel like absolute shit.
    On the train home, drunk from the afternoon's booze, and morose for where I'd found myself in life, I began to cry. I cried on the train, I cried as I walked from the station up to my house, and I cried as I sat at my laptop, staring once again at the novel I'd self published last year, that had one five star review from Sophia, and had sold only a handful of copies since its release.
    On a blank page, I wrote 'I'm a failure', and then held down the exclamation key until six whole pages were filled up.
     
     
    Chapter 3
     
    The two removal trucks carved through the winding lanes, tyres hissing and kicking up country dust. Alice and James had been allowed to sit in the cab up-front, while their parents followed behind in their car, a six hundred year old vase on Pam's lap, and the two cats in carriers strapped crudely into the back-seat.
    Alice had never been so excited in her life, partly because they were moving to a new house, and partly because the truck was 'super ginormous', as James had excitedly described it.
    Alice and James shared the middle seat - one seat belt enough for them both - while flanking them either side were a pair of the group of removal men their parents had contracted to move them from their house in London, to their new one in the countryside. Alice liked the man to her left the best, because the other one spent the whole journey smoking, and smelt of boiled Sunday cabbage.
    She'd not seen the house in advance, and when they arrived, she could hardly believe it was theirs. It was in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny village of maybe twenty other houses, none of which were close enough to be called neighbours, and it had five whole bedrooms! That was two more than they'd started with, and one more than they needed.
    James bagsied the biggest one straight away, but that was fine for Alice, because she got the one she wanted anyway, and she knew it was the best, despite it being a little bit smaller, because it looked out on the fields at the back of the house.
    In those fields, she saw a young boy, perhaps about the same age as her, walking along with his dog. She waved at him, and even though she didn't expect it, he smiled and waved right back.
     
    Alice's father, Peter, was a doctor. Alice knew that he worked in the hospital before, and now he was going to work in what was called a surgery. Alice thought that sounded like he was going to be cutting people up and stitching them back together, but he assured her that it only meant that he would be a personal doctor to several people, a general practitioner, and the surgery was just what they called the place that he worked.
    Alice had been born in south London, in a place called Earlsfield, because both of her parents worked in the city of London. Her mother didn't work at a hospital all the time, but she did go there sometimes when she needed to see a patient. She was a speech therapist, and it was her job to help people if they had a problem talking.
    Peter found a job in a small village in Cambridgeshire, and even though Alice and James were still in school, they decided this was the only opportunity they'd get to move away from the chaos of the city, which both of them had got tired of putting up with.
    James, twelve