‘Lifelong Learning’ by Ben Pester

“‘There’s a hole in your ear!’ Carl once said. You were in his spare room, during a phase in which you weren’t going out because Carl wanted things to be home-based.”

A couple of years ago I decided it was time to stop being sad. I found a therapist who was not too far away and whose hourly rate I could just about afford. I told him that I hadn’t been able to write in such a long time – I was barely reading, barely thinking – and he suggested that I write about the sadness. I left pissed off and didn’t return; I’d never heard something so stupid. I felt nothing, and this nothing had no shape, no substance: what was there to write about? Ben Pester’s collection Am I in the Right Place? is one of the books that brought me back to literature, mostly because it is hilarious and weird and surprising, but also because it is about the nothing I had been experiencing. In ‘Lifelong Learning’, the protagonist has a hole in his ear into which half a can of Grolsch lager disappears. He escapes an awful WKD-and-Call-of-Duty party through a hole in the back of a cupboard which leads to the Village. There, he struggles to articulate the shapeless nothing of his life and hopes ‘to find someone’. ‘Because I have been alone on the limits for so long,’ Pester writes, ‘I have been in need of my friends for so long.’

First published in Am I in the Right Place?, Boiler House Press 2020

‘Low Energy Meeting’ by Ben Pester

This story is a delight. An over-caffeinated line manager has brought treats to the meeting to counter everyone’s low energy. There’s been a slime leak and Raj has grown a third eye but the manager keeps himself peppy with Maltesers – full of brio and childhood confession. I’ve heard Ben read it aloud twice and I’m thinking of recording him just so I can listen to it whenever I want.

First published in Am I in the Right Place, Boiler House Press, 2020

‘All Silky and Wonderful’ by Ben Pester

The train on which the narrator is commuting enters a tunnel, prompting him to wonder: “Had we entered a new kind of space? Were we still physical things?” These questions seem to capture the essence of this surreal, unsettling, and oddly moving story. A story that, like several others in Ben Pester’s excellent debut collection, hooks into the subconscious and burrows deep. The narrator rereads a message on his phone about the death of an old school friend. After dozing off, he wakes to find himself in an empty carriage. Everyone else has moved into the adjoining carriage but when he tries to do the same, the guard won’t let him through. The other passengers turn against him, appearing frightened, even disgusted by him: “Their faces were subtly altered, as though they were now confronted with an unpleasant cleaning task – say, a dead and half-rotted pigeon, discovered behind a voided fireplace.” I won’t describe what happens next because that would take away the fun of reading a story in which the narrative direction is impossible to anticipate. Yes, it is an extremely funny and bizarre story, but moreover it speaks to the reader on a deeply human level. Neglected or half-noticed places, dark, hidden away, negative spaces—tunnels, lofts, crawl spaces—, the mundane details of the everyday, become alive with feeling and meaning. After reading, we too feel transformed, our perspective shifted to perceive the world in a new, “silky and wonderful” way.

First published in Granta, June 2019, and available to read here. Collected in Am I In The Right Place, Boiler House Press 2020