We present an extract from Close To Home, the debut novel by Michael Magee.
After Sean attacks a stranger at a party, and is sentenced to 200 hours of community service, he is forced to reckon with the relationships that have shaped him for better and worse - with his chaotic and traumatised family, with the childhood mates now stuck in cycles of petty crime, and with the deeply scarred city he calls home.
I had applied for every job on every website and recruitment agency I could find. Call centres weren't out of the question any more, and all those hopes and dreams I’d had of working anywhere that wasn’t a nightclub died with every conciliatory email I got telling me that the volume of applications was high and the competition strong. I was starting to think there was some kind of agenda against me; the bookshop said no, and that was okay, I knew it was a long shot. But Asda wouldn’t even give me an interview, and I spent days on that application, with help from the stuff Mairead had sent me before. The fella in the dole was pleased with the effort I was putting into my Job Search booklet though. He told me to keep at it, You’re doing well, but he was perturbed by how many jobs I had applied for without getting any bites. The best advice he could give me was to dumb down my CV so that employers wouldn’t think I was over-qualified for the job.
Don’t tell them you have a degree, he said.
I wondered how much he was getting an hour.
Things were finally looking up when I got emails from two different places telling me they were impressed with my application and would love to have me in for an interview. The first was an internship with a non profit art organization that had set up shop in an abandoned building at the bottom of Bedford Street. Fully paid for six months, with the prospect of full employment, they were looking for someone to help with exhibitions, organizing events, and to take charge of their social media. The pay was good too, ￡7.50 an hour, which was more than any job I’d ever had.
I texted Mairead and told her the news. She hadn’t come back to the flat since that night we ended up in Conor’s gaff; three days and I hadn’t heard anything from her. I messaged her once asking what the craic was and she just said she’d let me know when she was coming back.
Your bags still here
Do you not need it?
Nah its grand
I’ll pick it up later in the week
what about this job?
it’s for that arty farty place I told you about
They want me in for an interview
Unreal
U buzzin?
aye
beats the bar like
Not getting my hopes up tho
Mairead’s advice was to spend the next few days reading about the kind of exhibitions the organization put on and the artists who worked there, and to really ham up my interest in working in the arts: Tell them about the magazine you edited in Liverpool, and tell them you did all the fundraising for it, they love that kind of thing. She sent me a list of questions I might be asked, and she told me to make sure I knew what I was going to say, but warned against sounding like I had rehearsed. I took her advice onboard, and in the meantime, I sailed through my first interview, in a fancy nightclub in the Cathedral Quarter called Ollie’s. The manager brought me into the VIP area, where she sat on a stool with a clipboard on her knee and said, So how soon can you start?
I was buzzing, and the buzz stayed with me right up until I stepped into the art studios a couple of days later. It was dark, there were no lights, and there was a strange smell, like turps. A stylish man in a grey turtleneck told me it was nice to meet me and brought me into a gallery room. Three chairs had been placed neatly in a row in the middle of the room and, facing those chairs, one solitary chair I was told to sit on. I was wearing the grey trousers and shirt I wore to my graduation the year before. I thought I looked all right, Primark clothes weren’t the worst. Then these three intimidatingly dressed middle-aged people entered the room from somewhere behind me and introduced themselves: Philippa, James and Richard. They shook my hand and swooped on to the chairs in front of me.
Close to Home is published by Hamish Hamilton
