 Brought to you by Penguin. Anxious People A novel by Frederick Bachman Read by Marin Ireland This book is dedicated to the voices in my head. The most remarkable of my friends. And to my wife, who lives with us. Chapter 1 A bank robbery A hostage drama A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point. Much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea. This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots. But only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human being for. Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You're supposed to have a job and somewhere to live and a family. And you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never managed to get the chaos under control. So our lives simply carry on. The world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of. The moment we relax they drift off and fall in love and get broken. All in the wink of an eye. We're not in control. So we learn to pretend all the time about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we're normal. That we're reasonably well educated. That we understand amortization levels and inflation rates. That we know how sex works. In truth we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads. And it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round. They're in. We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don't know more about children than tropical fish so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don't have a plan. We just do our best to get through the day because there will be another one coming along tomorrow. Sometimes it hurts. It really hurts for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic because the bills need paying and we have to be grown up and we don't know how. Because it's so horribly desperately easy to fail at being grown up. Because everyone loves someone and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous and hindsight but which felt like the only way out at the time. One single really bad idea. That's all it takes. One morning, for instance, a 39 year old resident of a not particularly large or noteworthy town left home clutching a pistol. And that was, in hindsight, a really stupid idea. Because this is a story about a hostage drama but that wasn't the intention. That is to say it was the intention that it should be a story but it wasn't the intention that it should be about a hostage drama. It was supposed to be about a bank robbery. But everything got a bit messed up because sometimes that happens with bank robberies. So the 39 year old bank robber fled but with no escape plan. And the thing about escape plans is just like what the bank robber's mom always said years ago when the bank robber forgot the ice cubes and slices of lemon in the kitchen and had to run back. If your head isn't up to the job, your legs better be. It should be noted that when she died, the bank robber's mom cons... Sample complete. Ready to continue?