Hannah Sunderland - Very Nearly Normal

Published by AVON

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Copyright Hannah Sunderland 2020

Cover design by Ellie Game HaperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover illustrations Shutterstock.com

Hannah Sunderland asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008365707

Ebook Edition May 2020 ISBN: 9780008365714

Version: 2020-02-24

For Mom, Dad and for anyone who has ever felt like a failure.

Contents

The bevy of children and teens, freshly released from the shackles of school, moved against me and as usual I was swimming against the current. Not too long ago, I had been just like them; full of entitlement, the idea of failure ridiculous, the thought of ageing impossible, and death was just a fictitious destination. But now after years of unadulterated disappointment entitlement had transformed into self-pity, failure was inescapable, ageing was in full swing and death seemed like a quiet holiday.

The question I had asked myself over and over since graduating from one of those carefree young creatures to a bitter, twisted, neer-do-well, was How could such big dreams amount to so little? Id wanted to write and be read. Id wanted to see someone reading my book on the train and feel pride swell in my chest. Id wanted one of those little recommendation cards that sit on the shelves in Waterstones. I still wanted all of those things. I had a finished manuscript sitting beneath my bed, the words obscured by dust. Id sent it out into the world in an attempt to achieve that dream, but life hadnt quite played out the way Id planned.

By all accounts, I was a failure.

I failed at everything I touched.

You could gift me the rarest, most beautiful flower in the whole galaxy and it would be compost in my hands within ten minutes.

Failure had always been what I was best at, but funnily enough, my first failure hadnt even been my own. It had been my parents when they had chosen to burden me with the worlds most ridiculous name. My full name is Matilda Effie Heaton, but Id refused to be called by my first name since I was eight, after years of people telling me to showcase my telekinetic powers and asking me why Miss Honey wasnt picking me up from school. But the actual name wasnt the failure, no, the real failure was the initials and what they spelled when put together. Thats right; my name literally spells the word meh.

Meh:The universal, millennial term for anything uninspired and unexceptional.

Id thought about changing it a couple of years ago, and foregoing the Matilda part altogether, but the process had seemed complicated and, in the end, I simply couldnt be bothered. No one ever used that name anyway unless it was for something official or if Id angered my mother which happened to be quite often and in those cases she would be certain to use my full name, just to piss me off.

As I approached Bobbys corner shop, I reached into my pocket and withdrew my purse. I glanced down at my bank card and saw my full name printed across it in blocky silver letters. I stabbed my PIN into the buttons with my flaking dark green painted nails and pressed the button for twenty quid. The machine almost laughed at me as it rejected my withdrawal and offered me ten instead.

Fine! I spat through gritted teeth and snatched the ten-pound note from the slot.

That was another thing Id failed at, building any kind of savings in either of my pitiful accounts.

But, dont worry, it doesnt stop there. These are by no means my only failures.

Id failed to do anything other than coast through three uneventful years of university and at the ripe old age of twenty-eight I had failed to move out and begin my own life. Id simply returned like a homing pigeon to the town Id been born in, a suburb on the outskirts of Birmingham, famous for producing Emma Willis, having a very large park, and less famous for being within two miles of what may or may not be the oldest traffic roundabout in the UK.

My failures wouldnt have been so pronounced, however, had it not been for the ocean of people around me who seemed to effortlessly succeed to sickening levels. I saw them, with their smug faces plastered all over the internet. Id stay up into the early hours, slowly torturing myself by browsing through the endless photos of my successful friends posing on their London apartment balconies. Theyd always be holding sparkling glasses of Cristal as they toasted their promotion, all whilst draped over the arm of their fianc, who had cool ice-blue eyes and the torso of Khal Drogo. One of those loathsome people just happened to be my best friend, Kate, who at this very moment was on her way to the same caf that I was, probably with a sexy new haircut and some exciting news to tell me about all the things that she was most recently excelling in.

What did these people know that I didnt? Had I been sick from school when theyd taught the How Not to Suck at Life portion of the syllabus? Or did I just innately lack the talons that everyone else seemed to use to claw their way to the top?

Everything in my life had fallen short of expectation. Every endeavour doomed from the outset.

Failure was and always had been my default setting. In fact, the only thing Id excelled at in any way, was staying alive long enough to witness every single crushing disappointment; which I hoarded like the greedy giant atop the beanstalk.

A young girl sauntered in my direction, her long chestnut hair flowing lustrously over one shoulder. She flirted easily with the sliver of a boy beside her who listened intently to her every word. Her skin was flawless, as mine had been at her age, before those little lines had appeared in my forehead after years of frowning. The girls skirt was strategically rolled at the top to achieve the optimum amount of peeping thigh, the rolled-up fabric making her stomach look rounded and floppy.

In a few years shed need no help getting herself a muffin top, I thought pessimistically. As I passed the two young lovers, the boys shoulder knocked into mine. His eyes barely lingered on me for a second, before his mouth curled back into a smirk and he returned his attention to a more interesting subject matter.

If she was lucky, the romance would end before the summer holidays came. Short and sweet was the way to handle an adolescent romance. Otherwise, ten years from now, that happy teen would find herself with two squalling brats and a council flat that her partner never spent any time in because he was forever off working nights at the depot and having an on-the-side fling with Kathy from despatch.