For about a year I’ve had a line stuck in my head that I knew must come from an A.L. Kennedy story because it’s so painful and so wry, so unmistakably her; including one of her stories here was a given, and as I was going through various candidates, I stumbled on the source of it. ‘A Little Like Light’ is the story of John Edward, a (this is quintessential Kennedy) sexually frustrated school janitor and self-taught close-up magician navigating what could be, might become, may never turn into an affair with one of the schoolteachers. Kennedy never judges her protagonists – John is self-flagellating enough – but simply relates, an empath wielding a scalpel, every minute shift in the non-couple’s relationship and the progress of John’s own self-loathing. Towards the end, as he realises the affair will never come to anything, almost relishing the understanding, we get his wonderful, gutting revelation: “This is love. This terrible feeling. This knowing I would rather see her than be content.” No wonder it stuck with me. It takes the top off my head, every time.
Collected in Indelible Acts, Jonathan Cape, 2002
A Personal Anthology 