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Mudlark
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by Mudlark 2019
SECOND EDITION
Text © Joel Golby 2019
Cover and chapter illustrations © Bill Bragg 2019
Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Joel Golby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008265427
Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008265434
Version 2019-12-16
This book is dedicated to Sacha Fernando,
who gave me an iPad once. This is the deal.
We are even now.
CONTENTS
THINGS YOU ONLY KNOW IF BOTH YOUR PARENTS ARE DEAD
24 STORIES FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT
WAYNE ROONEY IS THE MAIN ANTAGONIST OF MY LIFE
THAT TIME I INVENTED SITTING DOWN
I WILL NEVER BE AS TOUGH AS PITBULL
I WENT TO BARCELONA AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS HANDJOB FROM A SEX ROBOT
HEY: AM I A LEATHER JACKET GUY?
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
My parents are dead and all I can think about is how to sell this house that they left behind. It’s me and my sister in a room without curtains – we had to take down the curtains to decorate, so the sunlight is pooling in, and nothing looks more naked than a house stripped and moved around when the person who lived in it died, and no more is that so than in the cold, white light of the day – and we are painting every wall in this fucking place white, because my mother went decoratively insane before she died and discovered the Dulux colour-match service and went absolutely ham on that thing. And we’ve had three separate estate agents come in, with blazers that bunch around the buttons and a clipboard or iPad, and a special laser tool to measure the size of every room, surveying the corpse with cool detachment and weighing each pound of flesh for gold, and they say – all of them, in turn – they say:
‘It’s going to be very hard,’ they say, ‘to sell a house with a pink kitchen.’ Which