Excerpt from 'Fluids' by Sian Cummins

Author of this parish Sian Cummins has completed her first novel, Fluids - and before its even released, is already halfway through a second, The Elastica Principle.

Rather than referencing 90s Britpop, as we rather gauchely supposed, the elastica principle is actually an architectural principle to do with the distortion of structures - 'which is kind of similar to what goes on in the book'. Ah.

As for Fluids, Sian describes it as a dark comedy set in the year 2000. 'I think it mostly came out of the idea that a lot of people in 1999 thought they were going to wake up dead on the first morning of the new millennium so, in the book, someone does. It takes the piss out of the sort of apocalyptic paranoia that was around at the time and is still around ten years on.'

An early bird, Sian likes to get up and do her writing before she goes to work, which given that we find it difficult enough to get up and go to work at all, impresses us hugely.

Here is the opening paragraph of Fluids, as a taster.

*

On the first morning of the new Millennium, John, 30, named after Lennon, woke with a killer hangover, a dead arm and a dead girlfriend. She was lying across his arm, pinning it to the bed, her fidgeting over for good. John twisted his head to gaze into her sticky half-closed eyes and saw the light. Not flu, not just the tetchiness that comes with the time of year, but an appliance leaking colourless fumes. They’d pushed a leaflet under every door in the block about the dangers of carbon monoxide and it was only now, in the few seconds between sleep and the sight of her dilated pupils, that the message came home. Her choked bloodstream, his own red cells working against him, binding themselves gladly to the poison. He had lived through the night against the odds; remarkable enough in the circumstances to seem like a challenge, but fuck that. In the same revelatory seconds, John had resolved that there would be no fight. Maybe for Sarah, it if hadn’t been very obviously too late. For all the hand-holding people did, for all the snuggling up, baby talk and acting coy, this is what it came down to. The protective instinct meant human fragility, that is, the possibility of this - her; cold and unmoving, deader than punk rock, and him doubting that blowing his own toxic breath into her mouth would do any good. And it wouldn’t. She was gone. So he wasn’t even going to try saving himself. He would stage a bed-in with her for whatever time he had left; a quiescent John to her stiffening Yoko. I’m sorry Sarah, he thought, but don’t worry, I’m on my way.