My string of connections ends here, I can find no link between Elson and Bennett, other than they both came into my life not entirely through free will. Elson was on a reading list for that same creative writing master’s and Alan was an impulsive purchase in a charity shop. In Spain, where I live, it’s not all that easy to get hold of books in English, not in a physical bookshop anyway. My parents also live in Spain, in an area where a lot of British people live. And where there are British people, there are charity shops, it seems. Whenever I go and visit them I always hunt for books in English and that is how I found this collection. I love this story because it is so multilayered and also because it features lots of stuff. I also like stuff, like the stuff you can buy in charity shops, for example. But the idea that someone would plunder an entire apartment in order to recreate it exactly as it was in a storage facility is so random and intriguing as a premise, and also much more than the sum of its parts.
First published in The London Review of Books, 28 November 1996 and available for subscribers to read here; collected in Four Stories, Profile Books, 2006
A Personal Anthology 