Excerpt from As If by Isabel Waidner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1

I was in no state to meet anyone when Korine arrived. I sat on a chair in my sublet on Aldersgate Street, central London: an epic Hail Mary. Outside it was tipping down. It was mid to late May. Colder than it should have been for the time of year. Distended sash window to my right overlooking an alley, or to be exact, the external wall of the neighbouring building. Water was running down black brick. Splashing out of the gutter pipe. This was the moment Korine chose to put in an appearance, I judged him on that. He walked in through the front door like he owned the place. He was taller than me, and lankier, and that's saying something, given that I myself had a hard time maintaining my posture on my chair: hard-plastic shell, cracked red with other, bleaker tones, thought-up as if for people half my height. I corkscrewed my lower legs, it gave me no comfort. How could it: Korine positioned himself directly in front of me, leaving puddles on the floor: grey marbled linoleum tiling, laid in the sixties I guessed, surviving wave after wave of gentrification.

I defaulted to common courtesy: I invited him to sit down on the empty chair facing mine like an open house.

He couldn't possibly, Korine said. His thoracic cage was prone to concussing. It hurt when he sat for too long in any one position. He would prefer to lie on the sofa. He had taken a liking to it: its teak frame, greenish leather cushions, slit where it hurt.

Please, I insisted. The chair. I was trying to contain him. Shows what I knew.

He obliged reluctantly. Sat there with his legs crossed, arms wrapped round his torso, moments from falling in on itself I was led to believe. At a guess, he was in his late forties. Younger-looking, if I took myself as a benchmark. He had dark brown hair not unlike mine, wavy and a little too long. My unremarkable eyes, they were looking back at me. He wore a novelty t-shirt, the less said of it the better, and pyjama bottoms. Not to mention his sliders: why, in this weather. Were we ever to be seen together, I thought, we would reflect badly on each other.

'Lewis,' I said as per introduction. 'Aubrey Lewis.' Former actor whose career has come to nothing, I didn't say. Husband who lost his wife and subsequently himself, I didn't lead with that either.

'Lindsey Korine,' he said. 'Pleased to meet you.' Then he said he was cold.

What did he want me to say. Weren't we all. I showed him the cream-coloured tracksuit bottoms I was wearing, the mismatched top, which crucially I'd tucked in to protect and keep warm my pelvic girdle. A musculoskeletal vulnerability, I explained, perhaps to show him it could be done: tolerate the conditions. I went to the lengths of displaying my footwear: brown Oxford shoes, oddly puffed up, pillowed, even, as if the leather had been soaked in order to swell it. I didn't know who made such things. What sort of factory. What sweatshop, it was unimaginable.

'Can we turn on the heating,' Korine said. His clothes would never dry at this rate.

'No,' I said. It was spring. The communal heating had been turned off.

Korine, I learnt, was unable to put up with his discomfort for even a minute. He got up from his chair, which was an undertaking. Nothing was simple with him. He made for the crowded coat stand by the door, minded to layer up.

Over two years into my subtenancy, I had yet to go near the various pieces of outerwear deposited there. They didn't belong to me. Hardly anything in the flat did. The paperback with the azure-blue and light brown cover on the table in front of me: I suppose it did. The cardboard boxes next to the sofa did, too. I'd never unpacked them. The flat itself, its fittings and furniture, the large part of its contents, had no connections to me or the life I had lived prior to moving here: this, the attraction. Why I had left the place more or less as I'd found it. Some concessions: my Equity trade union card on the windowsill. I once was an active member, that was before. A Kumari Burman print of a neon-lit tiger with bindis and puffy stickers of animal astronauts, a present from my wife, which I'd removed from its frame and sellotaped to the naked wall. In an otherwise impersonal environment, I had learnt to appreciate these.

Excerpted from As If by Isabel Waidner. Copyright © 2026 by Isabel Waidner. Excerpted by permission of FSG Originals. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.