Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette)
    The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette)
    The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette)
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette)

    By Andy Conway

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Tony is 15 and he's in trouble. It's not that he secretly reads James Joyce and his schoolmates would kill him if they found out what a freak he was. It's not that he's trying to write his story and can't find the right voice. It's that his girlfriend, Janine, is pregnant, and in a couple of months everyone will know and his life will be over. So he's decided to end it himself.

    Set in 1981, in the aftershock of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis's suicide, The Girl with the Bomb Inside is a 16,000-word novelette that explodes with all the filth and fury of a three-minute punk song, hammering at the bars of its teenage prison with a foul-mouthed and brutal depiction of a schoolyard pregnancy.

    This Smashwords edition also features a free sample chapter from Andy Conway's next novel, postmodern Hungarian campus romance, Train Can't Bring Me Home.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAndy Conway
    Release dateMar 28, 2011
    ISBN9781458012210
    The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette)
    Author

    Andy Conway

    Andy Conway is a prolific novelist, screenwriter and self-publisher who secretly time travels to mine story ideas for his Touchstone series. His first feature film, Arjun & Alison, a campus revenge thriller, toured film festivals around the world and was released in UK cinemas in spring 2014. His second, Long Dead Road, another revenge thriller, is currently in pre-production and will be released as a novel in autumn 2014. Read more at www.andyconway.net

    Read more from Andy Conway

    Related to The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette)

    Related ebooks

    Coming of Age Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Perfection

      Jun 9, 2020

      For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume. My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when

      9 min read

    • Article

      How Postcards From My Mother Helped Me Survive Childhood

      Mar 3, 2017

      For years, my mother wrote to me every day. I’d been sent away to boarding school and for the first weeks was forbidden to call home­. I was eleven. This was just before mobile phones came beeping and clicking into the lives of everyday people. I di

      4 min read

    • Article

      Alan Cumming

      Nov 1, 2021

      Alan Cumming
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Poetry No. 114

      Jun 5, 2023

      The Art of Poetry No. 114
      29 min read

    • Article

      Teaching Poetry in Prison

      Feb 16, 2018

      Teaching Poetry in Prison
      7 min read

    • Article

      Happy Accidents

      Oct 17, 2017

      Happy Accidents
      8 min read

    • Article

      Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

      Jun 10, 2020

      Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sophia Shalmiyev

      Dec 20, 2019

      Let us begin at the natural home of all the white-men-are-garbage controversies and go right to the crotch area. The post A Year in Reading: Sophia Shalmiyev appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Highly Gifted/ Highly At-Risk

      May 8, 2017

      Highly Gifted/ Highly At-Risk
      15 min read

    • Article

      Name A Song

      Oct 9, 2019

      Name A Song
      12 min read

    • Article

      I Used to Give Men Mercy

      Feb 12, 2018

      I Used to Give Men Mercy
      12 min read

    • Article

      Muse Mail

      Nov 1, 2023

      Muse Mail
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Carvell Wallace

      Dec 2, 2020

      No wonder literary critics of the time panned the book. It did not pretend. A perfect thing for a book to avoid doing in a year in which for the very briefest of moments, and in the very slightest of ways, we could all see that the veil had been lift

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Inherited Imagination

      Aug 18, 2020

      The Inherited Imagination
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette)

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Girl with the Bomb Inside (A Novelette) - Andy Conway

      All good novels start like this

      Ewan Glumie was not supposed to be sitting in Mr Richards’ classroom that cold February morning but, as the genial old teacher had been his own form teacher for the previous year oh fuck it this is bollocks

      Or this

      I was in my final year at school, a low grade Comprehensive in the inner city of the second city, but small enough to possess a certain charm in that a sense of community prevailed throughout oh god that's just shit

      Rarely like this

      Look just write it the way it is the way it happened the way it is happening right now it’s the only way to deal with it forget all this past tense nineteenth century bullshit it doesn’t mean anything anymore it doesn’t mean anything here in this life I’m living now this nightmare so forget it Christ even a stupid fictitious name like this was some Dickens shit or something no forget all that and just TELL THE TRUTH FOR FUCK’S SAKE

      A fish speaks

      The first thing I should warn you is I’m only fifteen. I wear a school uniform, acne loves me, I swear on the bus, the usual stuff. But I’d surprise you. I’d surprise you in lots of ways. Not even the usual ways. If I said I was sniffing glue in the schoolyard, nicking cars at night and murdering any schoolmates who give me a funny look, you’d be surprised, but it would be in the usual way. The papers are full of that. The saddest thing is every kid in the school has read about it but they can’t find it anywhere. We’ve all looked. We want to find the drug dealers, we want to join the joy riding gang; we might even fancy murdering a few of our mates, but all this stuff is happening somewhere else; it isn’t happening here. I don’t think it’s happening anywhere really. I mean, our school’s supposed to be the worst in the city, it’s official, it’s at the bottom of the league table and everything, but we don’t see any of this stuff you get in the papers and on the news, so we’re pretty cynical about it. I am, anyway. I haven’t asked any of my friends about it because most of them don’t think about anything much, and I’ve got too many things to think about now.

      This is one of the things that should surprise you. I think. It’s true. I think about lots of things, really deep shit. I’ve no right to, I know, being a prole from a Dream Crushing Hate Machine they call a secondary modern, but I do it all the same. It’s their fault. They should’ve creamed me off into one of their posh schools. I’d have been fucking wonderful; I’d have hit critical mass, if I hadn’t been surrounded by these estate trash fuckwits. But it’s too late now. I fucked up. It must be in your blood. You think you can evolve out of the sludge, but you end up stranded half-way. I’m the fish that tried to crawl up the beach, the coelacanth they taught us about and no one gave a shit about but me because I recognised a fellow spirit. I'm the coelacanth crawling up the beach, but the fresh air is killing me, and another wave is gonna come in and drag me back into the sea. I can hear it coming. I’ve got no chance. It must have been in my blood all along. I thought I could evolve, but I can’t. I’ve blown it. Blown it big fucking style. Did what a thousand other braindead fuckers have done before, and I thought I had a working brain. Maybe it isn’t in the blood, maybe it’s the landscape. Maybe one of those posh school kids would have done the same. I think I got swapped at birth. I think I must be a changeling. I think some pleb must be sitting in a posh school now, getting the upbringing that was supposed to be mine. I can feel it. I don’t belong in this mess. I wouldn’t be thinking these thoughts if I did. I wouldn’t be thinking if I did.

      Getting noticed

      I use some great words, don’t I? Pretty impressive for a fifteen year-old freak killing time in the city’s worst school. I read books and everything. There’s this house near the school that isn’t a house, it’s just full of books, and you can go inside it without knocking and just read these books. They even let you take them home as long as you bring them back. The first time I walked in there I thought they were gonna tell me to fuck off, but they don’t mind (it’s having to wear a shirt and grey pullover with the school tie: it makes you feel like a freak; they fit you up for a joy rider or something). I go in there loads, when none of my schoolmates are looking. I walk across the car park, up the three steps and into the corridor that echoes and reminds me of my old infants’ school, straight past the children’s section and into the main room. They’ve got hundreds of books in there. I thought they were gonna tell me to fuck off into the children’s room first but they don’t even look at me. It’s dead quiet in there. I sometimes go at dinner times just to get away from the school; it drives you fucking mental sometimes.

      I don’t nick the books or anything; I borrow them like everyone else. I’ve got the proper card and everything. They let me borrow anything, so long as it’s got no pictures of half-dressed women on the front. They think those would corrupt my mind, but they’re too fucking late, I’ve already seen the lot. I take out some great books. They’d lock me away if they found out at school. They’d think I was a right basket case, reading this lot. I like Sartre, he’s okay, good stories, and Camus’s all right too. I’m having great fun with those two. They can stick their teenage fiction up their arse, along with their strange idea of syllabus-suitable literature. I’ve stopped reading all that stuff. I’m really gonna totally fuck up my exams, but I’m not reading that shite.

      There’s some good books in the school library, actually. No one reads them. I never look at them either, that’d be dead

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1