The Edge

by Jamie Collinson

  Aeons of time alone in his room, reading about musicians and playing records and dreaming of the life he wanted, a thousand virgin pathways stretching ahead.

  Sofia, standing in an alleyway in east London with the wind in her hair. Walking ahead of him on a rainy mountainside, turning to look at him and smiling. Gone, all of it, sliding through his fingers like water, or his ring tumbling down a drain.

  If he’d stayed with Sofia he could have poured it all into children, he realized. Kids that knew it how it was. He could have kept some of all this alive. Shown it to them so they could carry it on after he was gone.

  Instead, he’d ruined everything. Failed to continue what his parents had started.

  It doesn’t matter if they’re all gone, he thought. You still have a duty to do. And I want to, he realized. I want to go home.

  ‘Adam?’ Jason said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  I used to work in the music industry, he heard his future self say, to a cheap-suited, sceptical colleague in a stifling office somewhere in the west of England. Wasn’t this job the only thing he actually had left? Without it, he wouldn’t be special. The idea frightened him. And how much harder, and more tragic, to pour scorn on something you weren’t invited to any longer.

  He wasn’t sure he was cut out to be jobless. There was every chance that a different job would be much worse than the one he had. There were, after all, still a few records he did enjoy working on. The ones the Autodidact begrudgingly kept on for the critical acclaim they earned. The ones whose fans didn’t own selfie sticks.

  So stay? Win Erica back. Let his sister look after his mum. Make the best of the new world he’d created. Learn to enjoy success. Have some staying power. Don’t throw away LA, like everything else. The apartment and the car and the woman he might still win. The mountains and the birds and the river. Was all of that enough? Was that the brave decision – staying power, all that – or was it the weak one?

  He saw the strikingly clear image of his mum’s face, her brave expression failing to hide her sadness, as he’d seen it in the rear-view mirror of a girlfriend’s mother’s car when he was eighteen. They’d just received their A-level results, and his mum had been proud and eager to be with him. Instead, he’d insisted on travelling with his girlfriend to the restaurant in which they planned to celebrate.

  They’d been in front on the road, and every now and again he’d glimpsed his mother, alone in the car behind, waving and trying to smile, following them.

  You can’t run away any longer, he told himself.

  The osprey dived again. A plume of water rose into the sunlight and broke apart into shining fragments. A wing thrashed. The bird fought its way back into the air, this time with a fish clutched in its talons. It turned the creature parallel to its body, to optimize its aerodynamics, and beat across the lake, away from Adam.

  ‘Adam, you still there?’ Jason asked. ‘We can make some changes if you like. I didn’t know you felt like this. We definitely want you to be happy.’

  But how to be happy again? Do his duty and wreck his life in the process. Would doing that help him recover himself? He’d believed in something once, and those beliefs were like a wellspring of life and had drawn people to him. But was quitting his job going to bring that back?

  Nevertheless, the decision had felt right. He saw his father again, smiling. He saw the gasping beauty of the West Country, and his mum rotting in a home. He knew he had to go back. Another path beckoned, pulling him in.

  He thought of Erica, a kiss on the top of a mountain, and everything dissolved and swam into one.

  ‘Adam?’ Jason was saying. ‘Look, just take some time. Just think about this until the end of the week. Will you do that at least?’

  Adam sighed, the heaviness pouring back into his limbs. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose I will.’

  The osprey had nearly reached the far end of the lake, when it somehow dropped its prey. The fish fell brightly through the sunlight and back to the water, like a tiny crystal, or the tear from the homeless woman’s face.

  This time, apparently defeated, the bird didn’t circle back. It became a fleck against the sky, tiny, receding.

  Adam wondered if it could still see him.

  Author’s note

  For obvious reasons, music is extremely important to Adam – more so, perhaps, than his career. While some of his passion has faded as the novel opens, his obsession is undimmed. And like all music obsessives, Adam sees himself as having high, uncompromising standards.

  This playlist loosely reflects Adam’s path through the book. Pavement’s ‘Cut Your Hair’ is a perfect slice of US indie rock, and an arch, searing satire on the industry and scene. ‘Crash Bandicoot’ by Wiley is ‘only’ a mixtape track, but it’s a work of genius – a self-portrait in stream-of-consciousness east London slang, and an example of the sound and aesthetic that Adam loves most.

  Nine Inch Nails’ pulsing, writhing ‘Closer’ represents Adam’s dark, compulsive side, while Depeche Mode’s ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ relates directly to a scene in the novel. Adam loves the song as an ode to being high.

  He sees Nirvana as the gold standard of the guitar music he’s spent most of his career in – raw, poppy, accessible and dark all at once – and ‘Lithium’ is one of their best. By the same token, his love of hip-hop has waned in the face of the scene contemporary to the novel, and for him, Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album represents the genre’s high-water mark.

  Coldplay’s ‘The Scientist’ is the antithesis of everything Adam has always believed in – mild, middle-of-the-road – but it’s irritatingly moving, and relates directly to the ‘Coldplay crisis’ scene in the novel. ‘I Appear Missing’ by Queens of the Stone Age is a piece of towering, existential, angsty hard rock that reflects Adam’s low point in The Edge. Keen-eared listeners will detect a direct lyrical reference. (Incidentally, this song has a great coda, one of my favourite things in music.)

  Continuing the LA rock theme, Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Paradise City’ is a blazing paean to the place Adam has come to love – its beauty, and perhaps its darkness too.

  Finally, Small Faces’ ‘All or Nothing’ – an apologia for being uncompromising, something that Adam still believes in – for better or for worse.

  * * *

  My old mentor in music and writing, Will Ashon, taught me that the ideal length for an album is forty-five minutes, or, as we used to think of it, one perfect side of a C90 cassette. I think he’s right, and I kept this in mind when putting the playlist together. Unfortunately, I failed by one minute.

  1 Pavement – ‘Cut Your Hair’

  2 Wiley – ‘Crash Bandicoot’

  3 Nine Inch Nails – ‘Closer’

  4 Depeche Mode – ‘Never Let Me Down Again’

  5 Nirvana – ‘Lithium’

  6 Wu-Tang Clan – ‘Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit’

  7 Coldplay – ‘The Scientist’

  8 Queens of the Stone Age – ‘I Appear Missing’

  9 Guns N’ Roses – ‘Paradise City’

  10 Small Faces – ‘All or Nothing’

  Playlist available here: bit.ly/theedgeplaylist

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks first and foremost to my editor, Jenny Parrott, without whom this book would never have been written. She has an uncanny ability to see what a novel could be, and I’m a very lucky writer in having met her. Thanks to Alex Christofi – once a tireless agent and now an excellent novelist – for all the help over the years, including introducing me to Jenny. I owe a huge debt to Will Ashon for his generous coaching – in both writing and the music industry – and for a couple of invaluable suggestions for this novel. Everyone should read his books.

  Thanks to Harriet Wade, Anne Bihan, Paul Nash, Kate Bland, Hayley Warnham, Ben Summers and the incredible team at Oneworld, by whom I’m very proud to be published. Thanks also to Juan Gomez and Steve Hindle at the Huntington Librar
y in San Marino, California, for facilitating my rewriting in such a beautiful place; to Felix and Jess, whose late-draft readings were invaluable; to Dan Reisinger for endless help and encouragement; and to Tamsin Shelton for copy-editing the novel.

  Last but not least, thanks to my family: my uncle Ian – birder extraordinaire and true fictionhead; my long-suffering sister Shura, a brilliant writer, reader and editor, who is still seeking a specialized therapy for people who’ve read graphic fiction by their siblings; my wife Marie for standing beside me, sustaining me, and a great deal more; to my children for making me laugh – even when launching coordinated ram raids on my writing room; to my granny, for setting a wonderful example with her fiction habit; and finally to my parents, for more than I could ever say.

  A Oneworld Book

  First published by Oneworld Publications, 2020

  This ebook published 2020

  Copyright © Jamie Collinson, 2020

  The moral right of Jamie Collinson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78607-715-8

  ISBN 978-1-78607-691-5 (ebook)

  Typeset by Geethik Technologies

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Oneworld Publications

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