Please listen carefully.

For best results, follow the instructions below.

STEP ONE: In your late 20s, split up with your longtime girlfriend/boyfriend. Ideally this should be after a period of six or seven years.

STEP TWO: In the immediate aftermath of the split, while you feel the white heat of a new chance at life, move to a bedsit, preferably a windowless basement room in the posh part of Stirling where your grandmother did domestic service in the 1930s.

STEP THREE: Experience the first moments of doubt – the horrible, crawling feeling that this split will take not months but years to get over. Lie awake in the stuffy darkness, as your housemates return from their late shifts and turn the kitchen light on – the kitchen that your basement room adjoins, so that light spills in from the narrow strip of frosted glass above your bed, and illuminates the CDs and books that, in the absence of religion or politics, summarise your life’s beliefs. Although now you realise they’re just a pile of paper and plastic. Watch the shadows and listen to your housemates’ shapeless muffled chatter as they eat toast and drink vodka.

STEP FOUR: Move to Falkirk, about half a mile from where you were born, a bit like a salmon returning to its birthplace to die. Ensure that your new housemates are two older men both separated from their wives, even more lost than you are, even more cut adrift. In the evenings listen to their stories while you eat your soup. One of them is shagging his ex-wife’s new babysitter and the other is writing letters to a divorcee in Manchester. In the sleepless nights try to amuse yourself by singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. There is nobody next to you in the darkness to tell you it’s not very funny.

STEP FIVE: It’s been a year since the break-up. The pain is still raw like your guts have been scraped out with an ice-cream scoop and replaced with a trowel. But you have a new hobby. You go driving late at night. You only learned to drive a couple of years ago and it’s still a huge thrill, that rush when you stick your foot on the accelerator and know that you can control this hunk of speeding metal and give it grace. So you take your painfully uncool Citroen Saxo out on the M9 in the pitch black of the Stirlingshire darkness and hammer along the motorway, headlights sketching out the pit bings that your ancestors helped build. And while you drive, there’s one song that you keep on playing. ‘Weightless Again’, by the Handsome Family. “This is why people OD on pills / or jump / from the Golden Gate Bridge / anything to feel weightless again.”

STEP SIX: One year later, and you’re living in Amsterdam. On a Sunday afternoon you go to Paradiso, the converted church where Kurt Cobain famously leapt from a balcony mid-gig. The Handsome Family are playing. They are brilliant – funny, original, and wryly self-deprecating about their American passports. Your plastic beer glass buckles in your hand when they sing ‘Weightless Again’, marijuana smoke wafting around you, and for a moment you’re back on the M9, the darkness rushing towards you. After the gig, you cycle through Vondelpark on the way home, weaving between the rollerbladers and strolling couples. You think about the day you sold the car to a nurse. You wonder where the car is now. You wonder where your Ex is now, where all the housemates are, where the nurse is, and you hope that whatever they’re doing and wherever they are, they’re all happy. You think you might order Thai takeaway for dinner, maybe meet some friends later on. The breeze picks up and you pedal faster, glad at last that the weight has gone.

Neil Cocker was born in Falkirk in 1972, and grew up in a variety of Scottish towns and villages. He has worked as a teacher in Lithuania, a dishwasher in the US, a book reviewer in Australia, and now lives with his Polish wife Anna in the Netherlands, where he works for a whisky company. A Canongate Prize winner in 2001, his short fiction has been published in various anthologies, and his short story ‘Landfill’ is currently being taught on a Scottish Literature course at the University of Oldenburg. ‘Dustmetal Grey’ is an offcut from his first novel ‘The Vodka Angels’, which follows the story of a Scot teaching English (badly) in a Jewish ghost town in Lithuania, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The novel also explores the country’s bloody and tragic Twentieth Century through the eyes of one Lithuanian family. Neil is currently working on his second novel ‘Burnwater’, a dark literary thriller set in Amsterdam. He is represented by Jenny Brown Associates. To read a selection of Neil’s stories on the showcase section of this site, click here.

© 2009 Laura Hird All rights reserved.