Small Joys

Small Joys is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.All rights reserved.Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.BALLANTINE is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.Published in the United Kingdom by Scribner UK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Mensah, Elvin James, author.Title: Small joys : a novel / Elvin James Mensah.Description: First edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, [2023]Identifiers: LCCN 2022037761 (print) | LCCN 2022037762 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593499962 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593499979 (ebook)Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.Classification: LCC PR6113.E568 S63 2023 (print) | LCC PR6113.E568 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20220812LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037761LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037762Ebook ISBN 9780593499979randomhousebooks.comBook design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebookCover design: Cassie GonzalesCover image: fStop Images/Shutterstockep_prh_6.1_143034194_c0_r0 ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightEpigraphPart OneChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenPart TwoChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-oneChapter Twenty-twoChapter Twenty-threeChapter Twenty-fourChapter Twenty-fiveChapter Twenty-sixChapter Twenty-sevenChapter Twenty-eightChapter Twenty-nineChapter ThirtyDedicationAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author_143034194_ Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.—ELIE WIESEL, The Gates of the Forest PART ONE ONEI had never thought much about birds before I met Muddy. Any interest that I had in them, and the various species that inhabited Britain, was because of him. There were a lot of things I hadn’t considered before I met him.I’d often thought of life as something to be bargained with, to be battled with. It was an entity to which you repeatedly justified your existence, to which you made your case for why it deserved to be embellished with happiness and love and friendship. There was something almost mythical about people for whom it hadn’t been this way, people who were simply entitled to happiness by virtue of being alive.Muddy often made me feel as if I deserved to be one of these people. His enthusiasm for his own life made mine feel better by association. It was an enthusiasm that seeped into quotidian things like swimming, various kinds of rock music, karaoke, and, yeah, birds.The first time I saw him was on a warm afternoon in July. I’d just returned home to Dartford from university, and I had no intention of going back. I stood in the woods by my flat, staring at a small X-ACTO knife cradled in my palm. I thought I’d submerged myself somewhere that felt thickly wooded enough that nobody would see me. It was so quiet. From the trees to the dirt to the wildflowers, it felt as if the woods were closing in on themselves. The quiet hadn’t brought with it any peace; in fact, it had amplified my ominous thoughts. I pressed my eyes shut and begged life for something it had refused me, desperately hoping that once I opened them up again, among the leaves and branches there it would be, some glorious manifestation of happiness. But when I opened my eyes, the world seemed darker somehow, crueler, as if it had collected in its palms my every failure, my every inadequacy, and presented them to me, instructing me to behold the beauty around me and deem my presence here inappropriate.I closed my eyes again.A hand suddenly landed on my shoulder and I squeezed the knife tight, gasping in pain, dropping it into the ferns. I turned around and there he was: a tall husky guy holding a pair of binoculars, with brown hair down to his neck and a concerned expression on his stubbled, dimpled face.“Oh, pal,” he said. He was wearing cargo shorts, brown safety boots, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “What’ve you done to yourself?” He had a distinctive Mancunian accent. I looked up at him, panicked, trying to catch the blood dripping with my other palm. I was so embarrassed and desperately wanted to be alone, so much that I wanted to cry. But it had been my father’s teaching that I shouldn’t cry in front of other people, some “wisdom” from childhood that’d been implanted like a chip in my brain. “Ah, you’re bleeding, mate…” he continued. He fished out a handkerchief from one of the pockets on his shorts, waved out the crumbs, and began to wrap it around my hand. “Had my sandwiches in this but it should be all right.”“I’m fine,” I said curtly, yanking my hand away and unraveling it from the blood-soaked fabric.“Ah, come on, mate,” he said. “Don’t be like that. You’re bleeding. Here, look—”“I said I’m okay.”“Oh, pal, you can’t just—”I walked away from him before he could finish, holding my shirt over the cut, all the way back to the flat. Crossing the road, I realized I hadn’t brought my keys with me. I also realized that he had been following me. When I got to the front door, I sat on the bench just outside the building and kept my head down as he walked toward me.“Is your name Harley by any chance?” he asked, looking down at me. I nodded, still not looking up. “Thought it might be. I’m Muddy. I suppose I’m your new flatmate, then.” He went to shake my hand but then stopped. “Shit, yeah, sorry.” He took his keys out of another pocket on his shorts. “Let’s get you inside, then.”—Muddy and I had a mutual friend, Chelsea, whose dad owned the flat. Before I came back from university, I’d asked her if I could have my old room back, but she’d already let it out to somebody else, so I had to take the smaller third one instead. It turned out that somebody was Muddy.I spent the afternoon avoiding him. I locked myself in the bathroom for a few minutes, running some