Warrior

My back faces the sea as I sit on the shore opposite Warrior Square. Queen Victoria’s statue is hidden behind a deck with an arch shaped like a house. When we visited Hastings two and a half years ago, I took a picture of my partner and my two older children standing under this arch – could this be our new home?

I’m waiting for enough time to elapse to go to my Jobcentre appointment. Universal Credit has cottoned onto the fact that my baby is weanable and I ought to have a job. I agree with them, but who’s going to employ me? I’ve been looking since May, either over- or underqualified, the problem perennial of the elder millennial.

Querying goes as well as can be expected. My latest agent rejection said she was ‘not enough in love’ to take me on. Like a singleton after months of looking for romance, I’m starting to take it personally. Is my book flawed? Well, yes, but is it so flawed as to be unpublishable? I’m told I write well, and people who have read the manuscript enjoy it, but is it memorable? After so many rounds of editing, the through line is infrastructurally locked in – perhaps that is the problem – perhaps the plot is in service to an aim that is too subtle and lacks excitement. Perhaps nobody will ever be as excited about my book as I am. In that case, why bother planning sequels?

Maybe I’ll have better luck with nonfiction, I lie to myself. Maybe someone will hoover up a book proposal and pay me, a perennially unemployed elder millennial, to write it. Maybe. I mean, it’s a possibility, right?

At least I got my house back. I’ll be back in this area later, ferrying my older children to their weekly contact session with their other biological parent. Does Hastings still feel like home? I look back up at the house-shaped arch as my baby cries next to me. If it is, it’s one I’ll have to fight for