Watch and interview with Jennifer Atkins
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Jennifer Atkins was born in London, where she is currently based. Her fiction has been published by the White Review and she has written for the World of Interiors magazine. She writes with elegance and detail, her prose keenly observant and emotionally astute.
Her debut novel, The Cellist, was published in 2022.
Listen to an audio extract of ‘A Certain King’
‘A Certain King’
One evening back in August I left work early and took a train to the country. It was a Friday, warm with white clouds bearing down, and the storms that had so plagued the preceding weeks seemed finally over. After arriving at a small, busy station, I found a taxi without trouble – Annie had promised there wouldn’t be trouble. Earlier that month she’d invited me to come for dinner, the last weekend of the summer, for a reunion of sorts at her and Edward’s bungalow. She had spoken, drolly, about the meadows and the fields in their part of the country, and the drollness with which she’d spoken didn’t match the sight of the late-flourishing land I saw from the taxi window. The sight from the window didn’t match anything. The canopies of the trees were dark after the rains and the fields were heavy before the harvest, and the world seemed changed, altogether rampant.
It had been a decade since we’d been at university together. I had not been surprised by Annie’s insistence that we all come together, it had not surprised me that F’s return would be a reason to do this, but I hadn’t heard from any of them, not even F, since the winter. I’d been spending my evenings in the pool near my office, entering the changing rooms at nine each night, stripping alone and finding few other bodies in the water. I’d started swimming after F had moved to Italy, and I suppose it was for that reason I’d emailed him once to tell him how my biceps and my pecs were growing firm, how my body was feeling, in some ways, more certain. But he hadn’t replied, and recently I’d become ashamed and unsure of why I’d told him those things. Except I’d had the desire for someone to know. And there was a sense of joy, waiting just out of reach, as usual.
Annie opened the front door of the bungalow in a bright yellow apron and laughed to see me standing there. I was exactly on time, she said. There was a shadow at the end of the hall that turned out to be Edward with his arms raised, ready for an embrace that he’d forgotten by the time I reached him. They took me to the back of the house and through the dining room to the patio, where three plastic chairs were arranged facing westward. They seemed excited, agitated by the cooking maybe. Lena was there already, and she smiled when she saw me, and there was some fuss over getting me a glass and then a bottle of white wine was produced before Annie and Edward went back to the kitchen.
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Continue reading ‘A Certain King’ here.
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