By Elvin James Mensah

I had never thought much about birds before I met Muddy. Any interest that I had in them, and the various species that inhabited Britain, was because of him. There were a lot of things I hadn’t considered before I met him.

I’d often thought of life as something to be bargained with, to be battled with. It was an entity to which you repeatedly justified your existence, to which you made your case for why it deserved to be embellished with happiness and love and friendship. There was something almost mythical about people for whom it hadn’t been this way, people who were simply entitled to happiness by virtue of being alive.

Muddy often made me feel as if I deserved to be one of these people. His enthusiasm for his own life made mine feel better by association. It was an enthusiasm that seeped into quotidian things like swimming, various kinds of rock music, karaoke, and, yeah, birds.

The first time I saw him was on a warm afternoon in July. I’d just returned home to Dartford from university, and I had no intention of going back. I stood in the woods by my flat, staring at a small x-acto knife cradled in my palm. I thought I’d submerged myself somewhere that felt thickly wooded enough that nobody would see me. It was so quiet. From the trees to the dirt to the wildflowers, it felt as if the woods were closing in on themselves. The quiet hadn’t brought with it any peace; in fact, it had amplified my ominous thoughts. I pressed my eyes shut and begged life for something it had refused me, desperately hoping that once I opened them up again, amongst the leaves and branches, there it would be, some glorious manifestation of happiness. But when I opened my eyes, the world seemed darker somehow, crueller, as if it had collected in its palms my every failure, my every inadequacy, and presented them to me, instructing me to behold the beauty around me and deem my presence here inappropriate.

I closed my eyes again.

A hand suddenly landed on my shoulder and I squeezed the knife tight, gasping in pain, dropping it into the ferns. I turned around and there he was: a tall husky guy holding a pair of binoculars, with brown hair down to his neck and a concerned expression on his stubbled, dimpled face.

‘Oh, pal,’ he said. He was wearing cargo shorts, brown safety boots and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. ‘What’ve you done to yourself?’ He had a distinctive Mancunian accent. I looked up at him, panicked, trying to catch the blood dripping with my other palm. I was so embarrassed and desperately wanted to be alone, so much that I wanted to cry. But it had been my father’s teaching that I shouldn’t cry in front of other people, some ‘wisdom’ from childhood that’d been implanted like a chip in my brain. ‘Ah, you’re bleeding, mate . . .’ he continued. He fished out a handkerchief from one of the pockets on his shorts, waved out the crumbs and began to wrap it around my hand. ‘Had my sandwiches in this but it should be all right.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said curtly, yanking my hand away and unravelling it from the blood-soaked fabric.

‘Ah, come on, mate,’ he said. ‘Don’t be like that. You’re bleeding. Here, look—’

‘I said I’m okay.’

‘Oh, pal, you can’t just—’

I walked away from him before he could finish, holding my shirt over the cut, all the way back to the flat. Crossing the road, I realized I hadn’t brought my keys with me. I also realized that he had been following me. When I got to the front door, I sat on the bench just outside the building and kept my head down as he walked towards me.

‘Is your name Harley by any chance?’ he asked, looking down at me. I nodded, still not looking up. ‘Thought it might be. I’m Muddy. I suppose I’m your new flatmate, then.’ He went to shake my hand but then stopped. ‘Shit, yeah, sorry.’ He took his keys out of another pocket on his shorts. ‘Let’s get you inside, then.’

Muddy and I had a mutual friend, Chelsea, whose dad owned the flat. Before I came back from university, I’d asked her if I could have my old room back, but she’d already let it out to somebody else, so I had to take the smaller third one instead. It turned out that somebody was Muddy.

I spent the afternoon avoiding him. I locked myself in the bathroom for a few minutes, running some cold water over my hand and then looked through the first aid kit for something to bandage it with. I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing my bloody shirt in the kitchen bin where Chelsea might see it, or where Muddy might be reminded of this encounter, so I balled it up and stuffed it under my bed, later disposing of it in one of the bins outside. I stayed in my room with my headphones on, pretending to be asleep whenever Muddy knocked on my door and asked if I was all right.

Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was doing in the woods. I had always assured myself that I wasn’t suicidal because I didn’t meet the criteria. It was usually like I was on autopilot or something, but only until I reached that pivotal moment before I shuddered back into consciousness. But I’d got so close this time.

Excerpt from “Small Joys” copyright © 2023 by Elvin James Mensah. Published by Scribner UK

About the book: Harley is a young queer Black man struggling to find his way in mid-noughties Britain. Returning home to Dartford, having just dropped out of an undergraduate course in music journalism, he is wracked by feelings of failure and inadequacy. Muddy is an ebullient Mancunian whose lust for his own life makes others feel better by association. He quickly becomes a devoted and loyal friend to Harley and in no time at all, they become inseparable.

Moving, funny and tender, Small Joys is a debut novel about love, friendship and finding happiness in the most unexpected places.

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Elvin James Mensah was born and raised in South East London. He graduated from Bournemouth University, where he began writing his first novel, Small Joys.

You can read our interview with Elvin James Mensah here