LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

       2017 – Central London

      It feels like centuries since I was young. I look around my office; Miranda is scrolling through Tinder while drinking a coffee. Her lithe body falls across a hard-backed wooden chair as if it were a hammock.

      Paulo wears mustard-coloured jeans, his feet up on the desk, the soles of his boots splayed towards me. The urge to kick them off becomes so great, I have to look away.

      ‘Yeah, I know, yeah,’ he drones into his phone, too loud and irritating to tune out.

      What right do they have to youth? They do not value it. They will waste it, as I did mine, and one day wake up, middle-aged, in an office full of people who believe them to be obsolete, an irrelevance. They will stare at the calendar and not believe the year – how did we reach 2017 so quickly? And then the day, Wednesday – how many hours until the weekend?

      I used to wonder what these millennials thought about me, then I realised, I’m invisible, they don’t think about me. On the first day Miranda made some polite enquiries. I tried to ignore her lisp as she asked, ‘Are you married, single?’

      ‘Separated,’ I say.

      ‘So, what you gonna do about it?’ she asked.

      ‘About what?’

      ‘Being single?’

      ‘Nothing,’ I told her.

      She gave me an

Скачать книгу