The Forgotten Guide to Happiness: The unmissable debut, perfect for anyone who loved THE KEEPER OF LOST THINGS. Sophie Jenkins

       CHAPTER NINE

       A New Dawn

      After that small and intense burst of excitement, I was back to my depressing real life again.

      By September my footsteps echoed hollowly in the bare flat and it no longer felt like home. I’d also sold the wardrobe, so I moved the Trek bike from the hall into the bedroom to use as a clothing rail. I was writing, sitting, eating and sleeping on my bed. The whole thing gave me a strong sense of nostalgic déjà vu – it was like being in the camper van again.

      Potential tenants were turning up with tape measures and questions about the energy rating and how often the bins were emptied and whether the bedroom was soundproof – what were they thinking of doing in there?

      I answered their questions resentfully. Especially annoying were the couples who stood happily radiating hearts in the middle of the room, holding hands and trying to imagine what the place would look like without me in it.

      In one of the interludes I sat on my bed and opened my laptop and found an email from Carol Burrows with details of the Towards Publication: Romantic Prose class which was starting the following week. I downloaded the attachment. It was a list of names, but names are sometimes all you need. Call me name-ist, but take Joan Parker for instance. She had to be over seventy, right? And Arthur Shepherd; he’s going to be over seventy-five – or under ten. I didn’t have much to go on with Kathryn Smart and Neveen Barsome, but that was the least of my worries because I realised I only had four students.

      Four.

      That felt like failure in itself. It seemed I wasn’t such a fillip after all.

      I lay on top of my bed with my hands behind my head and stared at a piece of silver tinsel that looked like a spider, left over from the previous tenants. I blew at it and a moment later it quivered frantically. I closed my eyes and listened to the night noises: a police siren, a helicopter circling the Heath. This was it; this was rock bottom.

      I went into fight or flight mode and let the tears roll. Despite scientific research which has proven that crying ensures high levels of stress hormones don’t overwhelm the system, I didn’t feel any better for it and after twenty minutes or so I gave it up as a bad job.

      As a diversion, I opened my laptop and looked up the video of Jack Buchanan on YouTube. There he was with the harness strapped on him, a grey cliff edge ahead of him and a forest below, talking into the camera.

      ‘Are you ready, Joe? How to be a hero, part one. This,’ he said, his face filling the screen, ‘is a balloon full of dye. We’re going to drop it on the target. I’ve been told to put it somewhere safe. Which,’ he said, tucking it into his sweater, ‘is apparently down here.’ He grinned into the lens. ‘Okay, this is it.’

      Jack was strapped in front of another guy and they ran up to the cliff edge and with a triumphant yell they tumbled off it. The parachute billowed in a blur of colour, jerking them up, swaying and getting smaller, Jack’s screams fading, and they flew over the autumnal trees in silence apart from the low chuckling of the cameraman tracking their progress.

      It made me smile. Actually, smiling is a much better antidote to misery than crying. I’ve never read any scientific research on why cheering up makes a person feel so much better than losing protein from tears – I suppose it’s not obscure enough to publish a paper on.

      I googled Jack Buchanan and found a lot of entries for a Scottish actor who’d died in 1957. Then I remembered he had an IT company, and I found him at AFB, Apps for Business. There was a red-filtered photograph of a modern office with a group of people looking engaged, Jack in profile.