3 minute read
BOOK EXTRACT
The Former Boy Wonder
This month’s extract is from The Former Boy Wonder, a novel by Lisburn-born writer Robert Graham, which includes loving recreations of life in 1960s Bangor and 1970s Belfast.
Our waitress, who has an Amy Winehouse beehive and winged eyeliner, leads us to our table, the only vacant one in the room. It’s six inches from a fireplace with a wood-burning stove, which if it were in use, would make toast of us.
Once we’re seated, Amy Winehouse says, ‘Is this a special occasion, guys?’
Lucy lifts a menu and gives her a showy smile. ‘Too early to say.’
Amy looks a little startled and says she’ll leave us to study the menu. Waitresses come and go with plates of tantalising food, and we sit and try to think of what to say.
Lucy’s wearing her hair down, which is novel and nice, and she’s sharp in her black and grey checked top. Somebody watching us might imagine that we’re the kind of people who go out and have fun all the time, so I sit up at the table and think about how I can become that kind of person.
‘This is my treat,’ I tell her.
I could mention our wedding anniversary, but I don’t want to. Things are bad if this milestone doesn’t make me want to leap in the air and click my heels together. If she doesn’t either, they’re really bad. I put my mind to it, to getting this conversation onto a better footing, and ask her about issues at the shop she has mentioned recently (the card racks need replacing, Emma’s unhappy, Lucy’s not sure why). Then I steer the conversation onto her parents (her Dad is drifting since he retired, her Mum says it’s been a long time since Jack came to stay), and onto her friends (the one with breast cancer, the one who had a hysterectomy, the one whose husband left her). We discuss the new Fitbit she’s ordered and her Rightmove habit.
I look at the menu, but I can’t make out anything on it. It’s like trying to read the bottom line of an optician’s eye chart. ‘Forgotten my glasses,’ I say. The truth is I couldn’t find them before we left the house, which I can’t tell her, as losing my glasses is one of the things that frustrates Lucy about me. I’ve been known to forget them, too.
‘Can I borrow yours a sec?’
She hands them over. While I study the menu, she looks wintry, weary. When you know each other inside out, there is nobody who can annoy you more than your other half.
‘Done,’ I say, in as upbeat a way as I can fake and give the glasses back, but the eyebrows aren’t impressed.
The smell of garlic and chilli cooking hangs in the air, the couple at the next table are marvelling at the mains a waitress has set down before them and I’m ravenous.
‘We should try to catch that film with whatsit in,’ I say.
She shakes her head. ‘Low voice.’
‘He’s very good. Kind of floppy hair. He played an MI5 agent in a Hollywood blockbuster a few years ago. He was in a drama series with Judy, ah, Judy –
‘Dench?’
‘I’m losing the will to live.’
‘Yes!’
‘So who’s the tall English actor?’
The Former Boy Wonder, by Robert Graham (Lendal Press, £12.99)
