We chat with author Alexis Hall about 10 Things That Never Happened, which is a hilarious LGBTQIA+ romcom about identity, mistaken first impressions, and a serious case of (faux) amnesia, and we even have the first chapter to share with you at the end of the interview!
At its heart, 10 Things is a story about found family; which is especially relevant during the holiday season…but also of family (re)found. What is it about a British holiday season that brings people together?
It’s interesting that you’d characterise the book as being about found family—as a boringly consistent believer in death of the author I’d never want to dismiss any reading of the text but I think to me found family is something quite particular. I suspect that part of the issue here is that “found family “is one of those terms that gets used a lot but doesn’t actually have a generally accepted definition. Although thinking about it, so is “family” in general.
I’d agree that it’s a book about finding family, but the type of family it’s about finding is very specific. And I think that’s possibly why my answer to this question has got so rambling and is growing steadily ramblinger. Something I try (not always successfully) to avoid is dualistic thinking, and so part of the reason I’m hesitant to use the term “found family” to describe the dynamics at play in 10 Things is that I don’t want to fall into the trap of using “found family” as an umbrella term to mean “anything that isn’t a 1950s nuclear family with a single male breadwinner, a housewife, and two point four kids who the housewife personally gave birth to “.
The family dynamics in 10TTNH (TTTNH? T3NH?) are intended to evoke the dynamics of a working class extended family. There’s elements of that that are similar to the nuclear family—it’s mostly based on relationships of blood or marriage—and that are similar to what we call “found family”—everybody I knew had at least one “uncle” or “auntie” that was actually just somebody who was friends with their parents or grandparents. And it’s ultimately that specific dynamic that Sam (for spoiler reasons) is looking for. Part of his journey in the book is actually that he starts out trying to get something more like a traditional “found family” with the staff at Splashes & Snuggles, and it doesn’t work because it’s not really what either he or they are looking for.
So in that context, the question of what it is about the holiday season that brings people together is—in some ways it’s a bit of a clinical-sounding answer—simply culture. Getting the whole family together for the holidays is just what you do in the culture that Sam and Jonathan both come from. Quite often it actually sucks, there’s invariably a row, and getting the whole family together means having to deal with the local equivalent of your uncle who gets his news from Facebook; but not doing it means being cut off from a part of your identity. Which sounds at once distancing and dramatic but I think it’s quite important to recognise that “culture” isn’t just high art and things you read about in textbooks or travelogues; it’s the things you take completely for granted because you do them because you always have. Also I’ve written an awful lot of books about the importance of found family, or about the toxic elements of more conventional families, and I wanted to make sure I was exploring those ideas from more directions.
Sorry, that got long. I hope it answered the question though?
At one point, Jonathan reveals a tiny bit of intel about the Luc he knew in university…were these two ever really friend material?
Once again, death of the author; whatever dynamic you want to imagine Luc and Jonathan having at university is completely fine and no more valid than my take. If you’re out there writing Lunathan university hookup fics, please go right ahead, it’s not my job to tell you otherwise (for legal reasons I assert my derivative works rights etc etc).
Having said that: oh God no. Something that I’ve always danced around in the Material books is that Luc is actually from an absurdly privileged background. He acts all down-to-earth and this-is-me-eating-pizza-in-my-flat but his parents were multimillionaire rock stars. By contrast, Jonathan’s entire personality was shaped by childhood experiences that left him acutely aware that a slight shift in the economy could take away everything you have and uproot your life. That’s not an insurmountable disconnect, but it’s an enormous one, and you’d only really make the effort to get over it if you felt some kind of connection to the other person, and (in, I should stress my personal headcanon that is no more valid than anybody else’s personal headcanon) Jonathan and Luc never really connected.
If Jonathan is Scrooge…who would Sam be, in Dickensian terms? (And Gollum?)
If we’re talking Dickensian then we’re clearly talking A Christmas Carol, and if we’re talking A Christmas Carol then we’re clearly talking the best possible version of A Christmas Carol.
In which case Sam and Gollum are clearly Rizzo the Rat and the Great Gonzo. And actually I think that might be in the correct order. Gollum is clearly the one in charge in that relationship.
If you were Jonathan, what would be your favorite holiday tradition, which you’d never actually admit to your family?
I suspect Jonathan’s favourite holiday tradition actually is the one that’s explicitly in the book, where every member of the family has a personal decoration that they put on the tree and once those are up it is Officially Christmas.
I think he might also secretly quite like charades. Although I also think he’s probably terrible at it. And might have a tendency to blame other people when his team loses.
POV: You’re Gollum. You know you should love Samwise more, but you find yourself circling Jonathan more and more. What gives?
Y’see it’s questions like this that are going to make people think I don’t like cats.
I am Gollum. I am a fucking cat. That means I am not a pack animal and that I see every other living organism as something to be eaten, fled from, exploited, or ignored. I appreciate Sam because Sam knows how to get the food out of those weird cylindrical rocks, that’s why I carry on allowing him to live in my house. Jonathan, however, doesn’t make direct eye contact with me, and to my species that’s a sign of submission. I judge from this that he is more likely to bring me food and my judgement has, thus far, been correct. Therefore I permit him to carry on living in my new larger, nicer house.
Love Actually…yes or no? (And either way, what is your favorite holiday rom-com flick?)
Yes with caveats. Like obviously huge amounts of it are somewhere on the spectrum of problematic to terrible but despite what pop culture keeps trying to convince us that social media says, it is actually possible to appreciate something even if it doesn’t 100% align with your personal social and political values. Besides, Bill Nighy takes his trousers off in it, which easily puts it into the top ten seasonal movies all by itself.
As for my favourite—the troll answer of course is to pretend there’s a debate about whether Die Hard is a holiday rom-com or just a movie with holidays, romance and comedy in it. But I think the real answer, or at least the answer I’d feel churlish not giving since it was such a big influence on T3NH, is While You Were Sleeping. It’s sweet, affirming, goes to some surprisingly dark places, and has Sandra Bullock in it. What more could I possibly want?
Chapter One
IT PROBABLY SAYS GOOD THINGS about modern Britain— or maybe just about modern Liverpool— that when I was growing up, I got way less shit for being gay than I got for being
named after a hobbit. And while I’m glad my classmates weren’t homophobic, the hobbit thing did hack me off a little, especially because the hobbit I was named after wasn’t even one of the weird ones. If I’d been called Meriadoc or Fatty Bolger that’d have been one thing, but my name was Sam. Still is Sam, really. But my full legal name is Samwise Eoin Becker and so every time I started a new class, on the first day, the teacher would be reading the register and they’d call out “Samwise” and I’d have to say, “here miss” and that’d be it from then on. It didn’t help that the first set of movies came out just as I was starting primary school and the second set hit just as I was starting my GCSEs, so I had jokes about second breakfast and hairy feet from the age of five until I was eighteen.
Still, you’ve got to laugh, don’t you? My dad taught me that.
And it’s probably the most useful thing I’ve ever learned.
For example:
“Hey, Ban,” yells one of my employees. He knows what I’m really called, but this is Amjad, and Amjad is even nerdier than my mam and so once he found out I’d been named after a hobbit he thought it was hilarious to refer to me by Sam’s original Westron name from the appendices that he apparently knew off the top of his head. And I let him get away with it because at least it was an original bit, “they’re going to need you in bedding.”
I love my team. Not love love, obviously. More tolerate bemusedly. But the phrase they’re going to need you in bedding inspires a feeling so far from confidence I might almost call it concern.
“Why?” I ask.
The only answer Amjad gives is the only answer I need. “Brian.”
So I give a small internal fuck and head over to the afflicted department. Bedding’s half the store so I’ve got quite a wide area to search, but Brian has a way of creating a little zone of chaos around himself so I’m not terribly worried about finding him.
And find him I do. He’s standing next to the Country Living Hamsterley mattress, which with its double layered calico pocket springs, hand-teased soft natural fibres of lambswool and mohair, and one hundred percent natural Belgian damask, is one of the most luxurious, most expensive, and—importantly—most not-to-be-trusted-around-Brian mattresses in the store.
He’s looking flustered. He’s also holding an extremely ominous mug.
“Please,” I tell him as soon as I’m close enough to be heard without shouting, “please for the love of everything tell me you did not just spill tea on the Country Living Hamsterley mattress with the double layered calico pocket springs and the hand-teased natural fibres.”
“No,” he says, “I didn’t.”
And like I muppet, I let myself feel relieved.
“I spilled coffee on it,” he explains.
It’s not the detail I should pick up on. It’s really not. “I didn’t think you drank coffee.”
“I don’t.” He’s doing his best to look apologetic. “But I thought Claire might want one so I was bringing a mug through to the office just in case and, well, here we are.”
So many details to address. And so little time. “And you picked a path straight past the most expensive mattress in the store because…?”
“Well, I thought I should steer clear of the Flaxby Nature’s Finest 9450 Pillow Top on account of what happened last week.”
The fact that I hadn’t been aware of anything at all happening last week as regarded the Flaxby Nature’s Finest 9450 Pillow Top probably said not-entirely-great things about me as a manager.
“Should I ask?”
“Well, I was having a jam sandwich—”
“You got jam on the Flaxby Nature’s Finest 9450 Pillow Top?”
Brian nods, sheepishly. “It’s fine though, I got Tiffany to help me flip it over, so it doesn’t show.”
Once again, I make the mistake of feeling relieved. Then the bits of my brain that are professionally required to know how beds work start talking to each other. “Hang on Brian, you can’t flip a pillow top mattress. Because it’s got a pillow top. On the top.”
“Ooh.” Brian winces a way you ideally never want a man in charge of two grands’ worth of mattress to wince.
I decide that the pillow top issue can wait. “Well, I suppose we can at least flip this one. Come on.”
Flipping the mattress is hard work but at least it’s simple work and, once I’ve reminded him to put the bloody mug down, Brian can handle it with something approaching competence. We heave it up onto one side, pivot it about the middle, and lay it down nicely on the frame that’s being used to display it. Then I step back and check it looks okay, and I see another large, brown stain spread right across the middle.
“Ah,” says Brian, “now that one is tea.”
I’m heading back from bedding, trying to work out how to replace not one but two display models of high-end mattresses, when Claire, my assistant manager, sticks her head out of the office door and yells, “His Royal Dickishness is on the phone” the entire length of the store. Which she follows with, “And don’t worry, I’ve got him muted.”
“That just means,” I yell back, “that you can’t hear him, not that he can’t hear you.”
“Well, balls.”
One of these days I’m going to have to do something about Claire’s habit of calling our boss His Royal Dickishness. And also about her habit of shouting swear words across the showroom. And also, for that matter, about Brian just, y’know, in general.
Though I’m guessing that right now His Royal Dickishness is going to care more about the swearing.
I’m guessing right.
“So”—Jonathan Forest’s slightly too-polished accent glides down the phone line and into my ears—“this isn’t what I was originally calling you about but why the hell is your assistant manager
calling me a His Royal Dickishness in front of what sounded like the whole shop?”
There’s no way to cover for this, but I try anyway for Claire’s sake. “It’s affectionate?”
“How’s it affectionate?”
“It’s a northern thing. Y’know, like when you’ve got a mate you call y’bastard.”
“I lived in the north for sixteen years,” says Jonathan Forest—he likes to bring that up because it makes him sound more working class even though he’s a rich fucker who only gives a fuck about other rich fuckers. “And I never had a mate I called y’bastard.”
Privately, I think he’d probably never had a mate. “I’m just saying it’s how folk talk.”
“Even so, bastard,” he says bastard with a short a like a normal person, even if everything else he says sounds like one of the shitter royals, “has a very different connotation to dickish.”
“It’s the same principle,” I try. It sounds weak even to me.
“Okay.” I’m pretty sure Jonathan Forest isn’t actually a robot, but I almost hear his brain click as he moves on. “While this isn’t what I wanted to talk about, it’s very much connected to it.”
Oh fuck, he knows I call him a dick as well. We all call him a dick because he’s a dick. The way I see it, if you didn’t want people calling you a dick, you shouldn’t be a dick. “Is it?” I ask, trying not to sound too much like he’s just caught me wanking.
“Splashes & Snuggles has three branches now and a fourth opening next year. The Croydon branch is performing as I expect it to. The Leeds branch is performing as I expect it to. The Sheffield branch, decidedly, is not.”
Probably not the time to tell him one of my employees just wrecked four grand’s worth of mattress with a tea run. “In what way exactly are we not performing as you expect us to?”
“You’re over budget and under target. And, frankly, I’m a bit concerned you don’t already know that.”
Oh why does this dick have to be such a dick. Yes, we are technically a bit over budget what with all the stock Brian has trashed, and yes, we are technically a bit under target but that’s because his targets are bollocks. “I know what the figures are, Jonathan. But we’re a new store, it’s a competitive area, and we’re getting pretty close.”
“I didn’t hire you to get pretty close.” Somehow he manages to sneer just with his voice. “I hired you to meet the goals I give you, and if you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
Part of me really wants to say “fine, do that”. This job’s not worth putting up with this kind of crap. Except it’s not just my job we’re talking about. If I go then Jonathan Forest replaces me with
somebody who’ll give him his precious fucking “targets” and then what’ll happen to Claire and Amjad and Brian and the rest of them? So I don’t push back. Instead, I try to walk that line between promising results I won’t deliver and giving him an excuse to replace me with someone who will. “I’m sure we can work something out.”
“I’ve already worked something out.” He gives the tiniest, tiniest pause and then his tone softens just faintly. “I don’t want to let you go, Sam. I think you’ve got it in you to be a really good manager.”
You patronising shit. As far as I’m concerned, I’m already a good manager. Or at least as good a manager as you can expect in a second-rate bed-and-bath showroom in a competitive area with a team full of Brians.
Claire is holding up a piece of paper. It says, Is he being a dick?
I mouth yes obviously back at her, and she holds up another piece of paper saying sorry I can’t read lips. Normally this would be fine, but normally I’m not trying to work out whether I’m at risk of losing my job. I wave at her to get her to stop. She doesn’t. And there’s no way she was ever going to, but I like to pretend I’m in charge sometimes.
“…so that’s why,” Jonathan’s saying when I can focus on him again, “I want you to come to Croydon tomorrow so you can see how I do things.”
Tomorrow is Friday. My least favourite day for going to London. My favourite day for going to London is never. “We’re actually quite busy what with the run up to Christmas.”
“I’m sure Claire can handle it. She seems to have a lot of time on her hands. Certainly she has enough time to invent ‘affectionate’ nicknames for me.”
Looks like patronising shit is still where we are. “Claire is a valued member of the team and…”
Now Claire is brandishing an elaborate and lovingly rendered picture of a giant cock and balls.
“…and…and…”
She adds ball hairs.
“…makes an important contribution to morale.”
“Then,” Jonathan snaps, “I’m sure she can cope without you for a day. This isn’t a request, Samwise.”
I just about manage not to make a noise, but I physically cringe. I know it’s my name, but nobody’s ever used it except my mam, and I don’t want to be thinking about her right now. “Please don’t call me that.”
“The point is, Sam, I’m your boss and you’re coming to Croydon tomorrow. The company will reimburse your travel.”
He hangs up before I can say anything else. Which, at this point, is probably for the best.
“Are you all right?” Claire has put down the dick pic, which is what you might call a small mercy.
I sink into my chair and sit on my hands to stop them shaking. “Yeah. He’s just such a…such a…”
“Dick?”
“Such a dick.”
