Think Yourself Lucky Read Online Free PDF

with no pen and nowhere near a keyboard—Hall said "Let's hear the story, Len."
    "I was plugging the bookshop and I tried to give David a flyer. I'll tell you, you never heard the like. Everybody round us in the street looked like they hadn't either. He'd just come up from the station and he'd had, what were they, David, people trying to sell you insurance and get you to change your phone provider and hoping you'd had an accident at work so they could help you claim. And you'd missed calls while you were underground and when you rang them back they were all spam. So me and All Write were the last straw and David just let rip. Five minutes' worth of rant, it felt like, and I'm not saying in a bad way. Things I bet we all feel and never let out, but he did. Someone that was listening said he ought to be on the stage, but I'm telling him he ought to write it down for us all to read. That's another way of giving everyone a voice."
    "Is that right, everyone thinks like me?" When David heard some murmurs of assent he said "Then someone else can write it, someone who's had more experience."
    "You've had all you need. You've lived it," Hall told him.
    As David took a breath—he was only there from being too polite to refuse, because he was too often too polite—Hall said "What you need to get you started is a title."
    "I haven't got one," David said with a good deal of relief.
    "That's what you're wanting. Come up with one."
    "Darius means now," Kinnear said.
    Was the author amused by the notion? Perhaps he was by the entire audience. David would have been ashamed to own up to his suspicion, but at least his reluctance suggested a title, though he felt desperate for mumbling " Better Out Than In ."
    "You oughtn't to have told us, Mr Botham," said the man who'd protested about people taking notes. "Watch out nobody pinches it."
    David thought of using this as an excuse to say he couldn't write whatever was expected of him, and then he saw it was a pretext to escape. "I'd better go and make sure, then."
    He stood up so hastily that he almost felled the folding chair. Hall sent him an unreadable look as David hurried to the stairs down to the bookshop. Only streetlamps lit the bookcases full of hardcovers that smelled stale, the shelves of nondescript glossy self-published paperbacks. All the way to the door David felt as if he was toiling through a medium composed of dimness and haphazard thoughts. He was never going to be a writer, he promised himself. Even Kinnear hadn't mentioned all of David's diatribe; he'd left out David's gripe about the homeless man who'd tried to sell him a magazine. If this left David feeling even more shameful, at least it guaranteed that he would never publish any of the thoughts he should have kept to himself. Better yet, he wouldn't have them. As he stepped out of We're Still Left he saw the roofless church across the road, the walls left standing as a monument to the blitz, and it put him in mind of a hollow prayer. He suspected that was how a writer might think, and he expelled the fancy from his mind as he tramped downhill to the station.

SEVEN
    As she and Emily came back from the staffroom Helen said "So there's some justice after all."
    "Send up the fireworks," Bill said. "They're going to pay us what we're worth at last."
    His comic grimace failed to moderate the frown Andrea sent him from the currency desk. With a rueful grin he muttered "We can dream."
    "Which justice was that, Helen?" David said.
    "The man the police wouldn't take to court," Emily said. "He fell all the way down an escalator."
    "He's making out he was pushed," Helen said. "Maybe he met someone nastier or crazier than him."
    "Are we talking about Benny Moorcroft?"
    The instant this was out David regretted asking. "How did you know that?" Emily said while patches of her face turned pink. "I didn't say who he was."
    "I don't suppose you'll like this, but my mother is his social worker."
    "I expect someone has to be," Emily said