Taylor Burns: 'Hunger'

1

NOTHING again.

Nothing.

Not in the cupboards, or the fridge.

I mean, not nothing, not exactly, but nothing I can use, or want.

If I have to bore and bloat myself with another bowl of plain pasta, if I have to modestly grate some corner-shop cheddar on top, make the dish grimly twinkle with a twist of black pepper, like roadsalt in sunlight, I might cry.

But pull out my phone, swipe open the calculator, do the maths.

A big bag of Basics pasta is a pound. If I have that for dinner three nights in a row, it’s a 33p dinner. I only have toast or cereal during the day, some yellow-stickered fruit if I can find it, dying in the supermarket fridge, sweating in its punnet. Excluding Eden’s dinner, then, and all her other outgoings — Calpol, nappies, the clothes she seems to grow out of within days — I’m only spending a single pound on myself across three evenings if I do this, the pasta thing.

And like I know I can tart it up a bit, fry some garlic in olive oil and then toss the pasta through it, add some chilli flakes, a flutter of fine parsley to finish. But that only works with good olive oil, and the good olive oil has a security tag on its neck now like a garish diamond because it costs, what, fifteen quid? (I’m not far off; I stopped looking when I realised I couldn’t keep it in my hand at the self-scanner then snuggle it away with the rest of the shopping.) Mostly, my situation at the minute means I can’t be bothered to make things better when I’m the only beneficiary. The marginal gain of making a nice dinner for myself is brought down by time and money and admin and effort. And yeah I might do the tarting with the parsley, once, twice, but then there is a whole bag of it blackening at the bottom of my fridge, leaving a puddle in the drawer or, if I put it on shelf, dripping over what’s below, the bag sogging onto the labels of other things and making the list of ingredients run so that I have to unravel the ruined paper from around, say, Eden’s yoghurts, and throw it away, the label, forgetting again that when she asks for “slawberry” I will have to open them all a touch until I find the strawberry one, wasting two (vanilla, or “nilla”) in the process, launching them down the throat of the only bin that will fit away in my little kitchen, a tall ugly thing it honestly took me months to find since I needed one with strange dimensions so that I could slot it away between the fridge and sideboard and not have to have a stinking black bin with a food-speckled bag blooming from its mouth just out in the kitchen when all my friends seem to have smart ones that don’t look like bins at all and have separate compartments for the recycling, which they solemnly insist upon doing, the recycling, despite the big cars that they choke their groves with and look, I love them all, my friends, but while they are worrying about nothing, I’m stressed, defeated over wasting two yoghurts because Eden wont relent and eat vanilla, dropping to her nappy’d bum on the kitchen tiles and resting her head on the small squidge of her knees while she fake-cries “slawberry, slawberry” and I can’t be bothered to fight her, not today, a non-nursery day but also a day I had to be online and work from home for the freelance copywriting job I sometimes do, which actually involves no writing at all, not like how I want to write — it’s all SEO, brand mentality, feeding the AI until it eats us — and the men I work for don’t seem to understand that I am a single mother with a non-school-age daughter who can only go to nursery for the hours that the state pays for, so most of the time she is home with me and I have to complete their projects while also supervising her, I guess because I have never really mentioned it, and they’re not wankers about it per se, now they know, the men, but the insistence on, like, having my camera on during an online meeting, which means I can’t just jiggle Eden on my knee and instead have to have her scampering around my feet, my shin a maypole she swings around until she clips her head on the Jenga’d corner of a stack of books I keep under my desk to hold it up because my ex booted the back leg off it after an argument once, knowing that it was both job and dreams, the desk, the place where I wrote, or at least wanted to write, desperate as I was to go back to school myself and do English or even just have him, my ex, have Mikey watch Eden for a few hours so I could go upstairs and at least think about writing or at the very least doing something with my degree — which was so apparently pointless it didn’t exist anymore — and so now I have to crouch down and tend to Eden, check her while also trying to keep my head in the laptop’s camera’s aperture, an effect that has me bobbing up and down like a nodding dog while all the men’s floating heads’ faces stare at me like football stickers, and so no, I can’t be bothered to fry and chop and afterwards scrub, especially now Mikey isn’t here anymore and the yoghurt is curdling in the bin that I can’t take out because I’ve filled the bag too much and it’s created an airlock between the bag and the inside of the bin and there is no one here to hold it down for me, the bin, while I lift and lug and which I also can’t take out — as in outside to the curb — because the council have stuck a sticker on the wheelie’s lid warning me about what I could and couldn’t put in there, a post-Christmas piss take when collection was already staggered and so now my wheelie is overflowing as well and I don’t want to be like the woman on the corner who has a crushed velvet living room and fly-tips her Amazon boxes behind the avenue sign where they become mounds of brown mulch. Now all my bins are full see but my heart, if I’m honest, is empty for everything except Eden, who thank god isn’t hungry like I am.

I wake up and wonder if I have anything to look forward to that day.

When I realise I don’t, the hunger takes hold.

This makes it sound like I’m poor, I know.

But I’m not poor, at least not according to dictionary definition. I’m just impoverished, brought down.

Skint, basically. 

I don’t get paid for another three days, and my Universal Credit is three behind that. I thought I was fine this month but turns out I cut it too fine and now I have £4 to last me, this despite my, you know, proper employment, my part-time job, the existence of which means my child benefit is significantly reduced, which makes sense until you realise that I earn about eight grand a year — the copywriting for Advancea (an international business school where I don’t so much copywrite as create well-written workplace scenarios for corporate types to use in their leadership workshops in the UAE) x whatever other freelance things I can pick up — a “salary” a student wouldn’t work for but the very existence of which combined with the ghost of some of the long-since-spent savings I had from those few post university years when I was sensible and in the boringly solid relationship I drifted along with before Eden’s dad, the presence of these ensure that my childcare top-up keeps me scarcely above the poverty line, punished as I am for having part-time work (I’d be better off not working at all), especially since it’s freelance, a fact that the job centre treat as some sort of newfangled phenomenon and even call a fucking hobby, can you believe, supplementary earnings because I’m not technically self-employed. This coupled with my shameful salary ensure that I’m able only to survive and never in danger of, I dunno, enjoying life, always watching myself, my money, a hand-to-fist cycle that leaves nothing spare for trips or takeaways or new non-Mom clothes or a day out to the museum with Eden so that she can see the dinosaurs she loves so much, their bones climbing the air like stairs, basically any of the stuff you do for fun, memory, or just because; any of the days that make life worth living instead of just working, cooking, breathing; instead of Being a Mom, which I love but also loathe, so defining is it, the crux of every conversation despite how much I try to deflect and talk about something/anything else because I currently can’t even shower or shit in peace, which eight times out of ten is funny and adorable — Eden poking her head round the shower door and cutely startling herself at the water’s power, steam surrounding her face as she scares me so bad that I nearly stack it — but which the other two times is like, please god leave me alone for long enough to wipe my arse.

I’m moaning, I know.

It’s not always this bad.

Our normal routine releases me from having Eden 24/7 — literally: she still sleeps in my bed because the little box room I have planned for her is beset by a mouldy wall I haven’t had the chance or money to plaster and treat — and her nursery days relieve me of so much, making me miss her again even when she’s only been gone for a few hours. My knees knock together with excitement while I wait for the train to go and get her, and then I feel bad that I ever wanted rid of her for a bit.

Better still, when a no-work day coincides with nursery, the fact of my shitty financial situation falls away and I thank the god I don’t believe in for a day fully to myself, unencumbered by the demands of being a mom or having anything High Powered to do re: work, which work will never be meaningful to me because the only thing I actually consider work is the for-me writing I’ve been doing as a sideshift since I was seventeen. But I know I’ll never make any money from that, which means money is just something to be procured without passion, and that depresses me to the point that I would just rather not do much of it; would rather struggle and just get by if it means my mental destruction is lessened and I still have time to think about art and maybe even make some myself, the creative impulse not entirely dulled by made-up bullshit.

Anyway, I’m not breaking my bones like my dad did before he died. He bought into the fallacy of Hard Work and paid for it with his life.

 Mom, she does do what she loves. She looks after people — and is paid less than a mate of mine who does the social media for a juice company.

What I’m saying is that I don’t see my work as what I am. When someone asks me what I do, I want to reply, With what? Like, how is that the first question we ask people? It’s not so bad now because I guess I can say that I’m a writer, kind of. But before that I could’ve said, Waitress, Barista, or that I manned the phones at an energy company’s complaint centre for a month. For a year before Eden, it was Digital Marketing, a nothing job, completely made-up. What did me doing that have to do with, well, me?

My friends think I live in a fancy world. Love me but think I’m loony. Just after uni I got a graduate job scheme thing, 25k for fuck all, and I quit after a fortnight. They told me I was mental, especially the back-home lot, 25k an astronomical figure for a twenty-one-year-old then, in 2011. They couldn’t believe that I was bored, not with that in my bank at the end of every month. But I was beyond bored, more like bored out, and spent my weeks there typing potential paragraphs for my novel into the URL bar, exploding Excel whenever somebody walked past.

I’d kill for that money now, I think to myself, or for the salary some of my girls from Halls are on.

            I could get the plasterer in, pay off the sofa, take Eden to Centre Parcs and see things that are green and growing. But a job like that would jettison these home alone days. Worse, I’d be beholden to a Boss, be one of those people who talk about how full their inbox is. Jesus, I’d have an Email Job, full-time, all the time, unable to pass off the meniality of my grunt freelance engagements as something I did in the downtime between being an artist and a mother who manages to just about make everything work.

            If you’re wondering why I don’t feel complete imposter syndrome embarrassment at calling myself an artist, by the way, it’s because not long ago I had a short story included in an anthology of local writing, a point of pride that has sanded down a bit of that fraudulent feeling, if not by much.

            I’d submitted sporadically in the past, first getting cold rejections to the poems I tried to place in the last of the big magazines, then warmer ones when I started fucking about with fiction and narrative non-, rejections that said they would love to hear from me in the future; my voice was exciting and limber, they said, but what I had written now, then, was just not quite right. I submitted again in the future and heard nothing. Then COVID, all that, and my submissions got ghosted evermore until I had Eden and stopped submitting. Then Mikey, where I stopped writing at all, completely diminished by him, creatively killed despite gaining so much Material, shrunk to someone inexpressive, sad, and quiet, which I had never before him been.

            Recently I started again, though.

            Writing.

            There was no throb or glimmer, no one thing that made me remember how much I wanted it to be true that I was a real writer, the only way to become which, I was told, was to graft at it like it was a real job, nine to five and through, arse in the chair, always in the chair, drafting to the detriment of everything else, the sort of sentiment only well-off people can pull, deluded as it is.

            I simply woke up one morning at 4am with a line in my head — a mamba moving through sugarcane — and opened my on-finance Mac to make note of it before I fell back to sleep and the line dissolved into the logic of my dream. Instead, I wrote right through till seven. Eden was usually awake by five but it’s like she knew what I was doing and let me have it, spark out next to me in her bobbly onesie, her fingers moving faintly beneath the mitten, like she was herself typing.

            Sleep has been the defining drama of our relationship. My lack of it; her refusal to get even a few hours a night. As soon as I get in next to her she stirs and wiggles and writhes, never crying and instead clinging to me like a shower curtain, the little plump warmth of her on my chest, under my neck, the cosiest thing imaginable, the closest I will ever feel to anyone until I try to move her and get into my own sleeping position — on my stomach, the only way I know how, a back destroying articulation that I swear has bowed my spine — and she senses it and screams and cries until I put my heartbeat back on hers.

            That night she slept through, though, right until my emergency nursery alarm — which I’d never before had to use, always swiping away the reminder because Eden had been up since four, five, overly awake, feral — until the alarm went off, at which point I snapped the Mac shut and swept Eden up, delighted for once to be in a rush instead of just please waiting until it was time to leave for the train and I could get back and try and steal an hour on the sofa, which I of course never could.

I don’t believe in that stuff normally.

            Fate, or whatever.

            I mean, why would I?

            What evidence is there in my life to suggest that anything even remotely numinous exists?

            But what I wrote that morning became the architecture for the personal essay I would submit, the one published in the anthology just before Christmas, a first-time success that might’ve been a fluke but which has nevertheless refired me, creatively.

            And look I know that not many people submitted, that I wasn’t picked from some huge pool of talent as one of the inconvertible standouts or rescued from the teetering slush-pile on an “important” editor’s desk, everyone in shock at how I hadn’t yet been discovered. But the people who put the anthology together liked my work, and paid out of their own pockets for me and twelve others to appear in print, eleven of us for the first time. (The twelfth was a smug younger writer who’d had a couple of things out in the past, one whom I heard say to his wife that he was “slumming it” as they stood out front at the launch and shared a Vogue.)

            Yes, there was even a launch! A get together at a lovely little bookshop beneath the railway arches on a drizzly, smoky Thursday evening in December, the sort of weather I always associated with bookshops. I was so excited getting ready, the first time I’d felt happy solely for myself since Eden was born two years ago. I did have a slight fear about the quality of the anthology, mind. I knew it wasn’t a vanity-publishing thing, that the book had been funded by grants and councils or whatever, that the publisher had some famous Birmingham writers donate twenty quid or a pull quote, but still, I was nervous that it was going to look shabby and feel cheap, like something self-published or print-on-demand. Vain of me, sure, but I’m not sorry for wanting the first book I was ever involved in to look professional. If it was, it would feel like the start of something, like I was involved with serious people and not the LinkedIn grifters and hacks and hucksters I was used to from Advancea. But I kept thinking about the Peep Show episode “Business Secrets of the Pharaohs” and had visions of my pain-filled words being misaligned, protruding from the book’s crease like they were being issued out of a label maker. To my surprise, the contributor copy we were given was great. Stylish artwork on the cover — those same arches transfigured into surrealist swirls, the train tracks above them rendered in algebraic rectangles which dripped like graffiti — heavy, printed on proper paper. Inside, Birmingham’s own Baskerville in uniform columns of text, neat and tidy and swish. I may as well have been holding the Paris Review, for how much it meant to me. They’d even put French flaps on the thing.

            I had no one there to share the moment with — I didn’t really tell my mates about it and Mom had Eden for me (for once). But I had wine with the other writers, picked a few titles from the bookshop, and listened to the readings from those contributors who had put their names forward to perform (no chance). Then I looked at my phone and saw that Mom had sent a picture of Eden sleeping, with an accompanying text that said she had been absolutely sound; they’d had such a nice evening together.

            What a perfect way to the end the night.

            When I’d left Eden with Mom before, I’d been beset with frantic messages, questions about what she can and can’t have, do, eat, capped off always with a whole line of the same emoji, the one signifying that she was frazzled. No matter what she’d do, Eden would cry-scream my name, to the point that Mom said she feared that the neighbours might think she was hurting her. I always ended up cancelling whatever I was doing — which often was nothing; sometimes I lied and said I had a Thing just so I could do nothing for an hour — and calling a taxi to go get her, trying to suss out if Mom was pissed like she promised me she wouldn’t be. She’d style it off and act like she wasn’t — Mom to be fair is completely High Functioning — but I could always see the sherry-stains on her teeth.

            Again, though, it’s like Eden knew Mommy needed a night, and, when I took her out of her sober nana’s arms on the doorstep before carrying her to the idling Uber, I felt something I hadn’t since Dad was still alive, not even when Eden was born, because when Eden was born I nearly died from a postpartum haemorrhage (the first time I saw her I had just been stitched up and was spaced on hospital drugs). What I felt, reader, was joy.

I was in college when I got the call.

            Mom’s name on the screen of my Blackberry between classes.

            —I’m so sorry, love, so, so sorry.

            —What do you—

            —It’s dad, Mal. Dad. Your dad’s—

            I didn’t need to hear the rest. I was on my haunches on the college carpet, struggling to breathe.

            Next thing I knew, I was coming round to a POV of four faceless faces staring down at me as if into a grave. Then nothing, a phase for which I’ve no recall, a blank strip of time barely a minute or a moment. It didn’t matter, didn’t exist, was all echoey and abyssal, black water stuck swirling in my ear.

            When I came out of it, it felt physical, like I’d just come out of actual space, hauled back into the shuttle where I could hear again and hold onto things. I was on a bench in the communal space, strange hands rubbing my back and a lecturer I’d never had crouching down to meet me, creasing the toe-box of his trainers. Mallory?, he said. Mum is on the way, okay?

            Mom and dad had been separated since I was two. They didn’t speak much and when they did it was as if they’d just met — and not in a good way. I hated the awkwardness they used to trade in during pick-ups, when Dad would grab me from Mom’s and they’d both talk about me like I wasn’t there (“what will she want for dinner?”), which continued right up until college, when they decided I could make my own way between their houses, eliminating any need for Mom and Dad to talk to each other at all.

            I’d always preferred Dad’s.

            Not him necessarily, but his place.

            For a start, I had my own room there. I had my own room at Mom’s, of course, and Mom would say, by way of mitigation, that not only did I have my own room, but I had my own rooms, plural. This was true. Not only was there a bedroom at Mom’s, there was also a little kitchenette with toaster and kettle, and my own toilet, too. The problem was that these were all part of the same shitty shed, which shed Mom tried to claim was a “cabin”, one that most teenage girls would kill for, a little “apartment” all to themselves like that.

            But trust me, it was a shed.

            I’m not moving into a fucking shed, I said, when it was put to me that Graham was moving in and so might I not like some space to myself?

            —Not outside I wouldn’t. Are you serious?

            —But he’s going to insulate it, bab, make it special. It’s going to be so cosy.

            —Why doesn’t he fucking move into it then?

            —Be reasonable, babe, Graham is moving in with me. We just thought you might like to be out of the way. You know. You don’t want us cramping your style and that, do ya.

            —Oh did we. Did we think that, did we.

            —Come on, Mal, you like Graham, don’t ya. You said you liked him.

            —I said he was sound. Meaning, yeah, whatever. Another one. Fine.

            —That’s not fair,—

            —No, what’s not fair is that you get another new boyfriend and banish me to the garden, into a fucking shed.

            —You haven’t even seen it yet. It’s not a shed. That thing out there, Graham will knock that down, and this new thing, he’ll build the new thing instead.

            —Build? He’s a fucking barman, Mom.

            —All right, well put up, then.

            —….

            —Just you wait, darling, it will be like a little chalet for ya, promise it will. It will be like you’ve gone skiing. Or to Butlins.

It wasn’t.

            It was a shed. It had a swinging shed door on pissy hinges, and slats of splintering rufous wood. It was shed-dark, smelt like a shed, built from new materials but still a square space of dank old-smelling shed, both showroom and shower-room.

            It looks like a shed now, Graham said. But just you watch, Mal, once you—once I lay some flooring down, slot your bed in, Tetris it all together.

            But it’s fucking freezing, I said, not quite in shock that this was happening because I was so sure it wasn’t. I’d convinced myself that Graham was building himself a bar, or a place to play pool, a man-cave where he could smoke his weed and pretend to pull pints on spare pumps he was bringing home from the pub.

            Instead, he started to come home with other things, shed things: a box of grey laminate under his arm, turning with it like it was heavy lumber; a scratchy roll of flax-yellow loft insulation; a fat off-white U-bend he had salvaged from a skip.

            Oh my god, is this actually happening?

            Yes, Mal, Mom said. It is. It’s my house, and there’s only a year left till uni, isn’t there. If you’re not going to live at your dad’s, we’re not going to wait a year. You’re nearly eighteen, now, it’s time for us to live our lives too.

            The selfishness astounded me. All of this for Graham; plain Graham; Graham, The Man. That’s all he was! A man, a middling man, the first of the average ones who, I would come to learn, would try to dominate and bring down my whole entire life.

            I mean, Dad was average too, a quiet and incurious man, but he was also kind. He would never have hurt me like Graham grew to.

            When it was first put that I might live with Dad fulltime, though, the thought of it saddened me comedown style. (I know I said I preferred it there, but that’s now, looking back, post-shed, remembering the shed and its cold and unfair construction.)

            Before Graham, Mom’s was a party place: it was just me and her and so we filled the house with her girls and mine. Every Saturday my college mates would come over and we’d have a drink in the conservatory and Mom and my aunties (actually just Mom’s closest friends) would join and everyone would say how sound my mom was compared to theirs. We’d play music, Wii karaoke, do shots of Midori, which Mom let us have as much of as we wanted, knowing it would make us sick, maybe, but at least not properly pissed. A couple of the lads from college smoked weed, and the as-if surprise they exploded in when Mom offered to roll their spliffs for them will never leave me. She had her own grinder hidden in a hollowed out snooker ball and they inspected it like it was a muddy archaeological find, twisting it in their hands, in the light, saying ‘na, no way’. We were the weekend’s centre, the place to be, Mallory and her mom cool and different. On Sunday, when everyone had gone, Mom would make a one-tray roast for the two of us and we’d eat it in the conservatory’s dying light, saying what a laugh the weekend had been. We don’t need no man, do we, Mal?

            Dad’s was different. I stayed there Wednesdays and every other weekend. Short durations with him were blissful. I was a party girl from since I was old enough to drink, and, in truth, years before that, too, me and my mates savage in Senneleys park, where we got pissed on alcopops, smoked, and were felt up by boys who were technically sex offenders. (When I was fifteen I lost my virginity on the steps to Senneleys by a twenty-two year old floor layer. My best friend at the time, sixteen-year-old Safia, was in a full-blown relationship with a twenty-eight-year-old, and had been since she was fourteen. Like, she’d met his parents, and he hers.)

            Anyway I guess I’m trying to say that Dad’s was downtime. He was a drinker too, of course, but a lonely one, pulling open can after can in his Chair, cycling through his videos after a day at work, takeaway on a stool next to him, still shod in his overalls, the straps pulled down around his waist, T-shirt off, laid tight to the radiator, the hair on his chest spread out like a bat in flight.

            This routine didn’t change much when I was there. I’d sit next to him on a camping chair, my own can of Shandy Bass in the cupholder. Dad lived in a bedsit. When the chair setup got uncomfortable we’d move the short distance to where his bed was and rearrange the TV so that it sat at the end of the bed on a chest of drawers. We’d continue watching the videos with our backs against the headboard and the kitchenette in the background, the pop of his can-opening so constant it was like montage. I didn’t love the movies we watched until much later in life — they were too violent, and male — but I did love being on that bed with Dad, warm with his enthusiasm for the films and their heroes, treated to a yet another takeaway as we watched, and watched. When it was time for sleep, Dad would move to the camp bed he took fishing, a stretch of taut khaki canvas you could’ve bounced a coin off.

            Next morning, he’d try not to wake me up but always did, clanging about, filling his bucket with brush, roller, scraper, thinner. My dad must’ve been the only grafter on the planet who didn’t drive. Every morning he would fill up his bucket and take it to the bus, only ever able to take on odd small jobs with the tools he could carry himself.

            I never once heard him moan about this. He’d often leave before me; I’d make breakfast before school and watch him out the window as he smoked a rollie at the bus stop, blew into his fists, shifted his weight between his feet, the bucket beneath him as if in an outhouse.

            If I never heard him moan about it, he never did much about it either, and for the whole time I knew him he doubled down and continued to work like he had his own business or was part of a decorating firm; like he had a bank account instead of the curling cash he kept hidden around his flat like a gangster.

            In reality, he was, and could only ever be, the handyman who got the bus unless a taxi would take him (rare, with his tools). He toiled at this for the twenty-two years of his adult life, chasing his own tail, chewing it and wincing at the pain without it ever really hurting enough to make him change. Dad took pride in his work, which was good, and neat, and he had no time for cowboys who got more paint on their overalls than they did the walls, but it was for barely any benefit, dying broke of a heart attack in his bedsit a year after I decided to move into the shed instead of living fulltime with him, a decision I explained away as hubris — ‘I’m not letting Graham get his own way that easily’ &c. — but which I knew he knew was bollocks. Every day I think of him sitting alone with his videos, sad that his daughter would rather live in a shed than at home with him, and every day I bully myself for staying to fight Graham instead of going to him.

            I try to forgive myself — I was a teenager, there wasn’t enough space, the sound of his darts drumming the wall would’ve done my head in. But all I see is him on the floor with a heart crunched up like one of his beercans, and I can’t.

Taylor Burns is a writer from Birmingham. He is a graduate of City University's Novels MA programme, and his first novel, Trav, will be released in 2026, published by Zer0 Books. Elsewhere, he co-curates STORIE, a night of experimental prose, run in conjunction with Voce Books, where he serves as writer-in-residence for 2025/26.