Read an extract from Oisín McKenna’s debut novel, Evenings and Weekends

It’s been quite some time since I devoured a book with the same hunger I felt tearing through Oisín McKenna’s debut title, Evenings and Weekends. I swallowed pages whole, at paper-cut inducing speed, and quite literally could not put it down.

Set over one pivotal weekend in London, a blistering heat wave seems to make everything come to a head for the book’s central characters, each of which is teetering on the precipice of something new. There’s Maggie, pregnant, broke, and unready to leave her carefree city lifestyle behind, and her partner, Ed, a man fixated with death and pursuing contentment at all costs, even if it means sacrificing a crucial part of himself.

We meet Phil, who’s infatuated with Keith, and isn’t quite sure of the intricacies of becoming part of an open relationship. Battling with his own trauma and intimacy issues, he’s on a journey towards trusting himself and giving himself over to others, while his mother, Rosaleen, is struggling to find the words to tell him she’s got cancer.

Home, family, belonging, and self-acceptance are the central tenets of Evenings and Weekends, and during it all, a beached whale traces a circle around them all. At once heartbreaking and heartening, the inner world of each character is wholly fleshed out. I cried three times, it’s true.

Read on for an extract below, and for the love of God, buy this book and read it stretched out underneath the sunshine this summer…

There has been a longstanding competition between Maggie and Phil, so palpable and real that it seems frankly absurd that neither of them has ever acknowledged it out loud.

When they were eleven, for example, a shopping trolley showed up on the estate where they grew up. No one knew where this shopping trolley came from and no one ever found out. It was summer and summer was a time during which unexplained phenomena could randomly occur without anyone ever needing to understand their backstories.

This particular summer was a long summer. A hot summer. It was the summer they were friends with Kyle Connolly, and Kyle Connolly had smoked a cigarette. He hadn’t enjoyed it, so he never smoked another, and this gave him a sense of mystique; to have done something so transgressive, and to have been above even that! An unspeakable glamour. He had snogged one girl in Majorca, one girl in Chelmsford. He wore a silver studded belt.

Maggie and Phil competed viciously for his affection.

Someone would say, ‘Let’s play the shopping trolley game,’ and Maggie and Phil would power walk towards it, never admitting they were trying to overtake each other, and never breaking into a run so as not to appear desperate. Kyle trailed behind ambivalently.

The shopping trolley game was this: one person sat in it, someone else pushed as fast as they could. Maggie and Phil always wanted to be the one to push Kyle.

That summer, Kyle and Phil played another game too, a game they kept secret from Maggie. Like the shopping trolley, this game was another of summer’s great inarticulable mysteries. Even if Phil wanted to tell her, he wouldn’t have known what words to use. The game had been Kyle’s idea. He had suggested it vaguely, giggling, through gestures and broken sentences. Phil didn’t know where the game came from, but he knew that it was nice and that he wanted to keep playing. The game was this: Phil would go to Kyle’s house, they would close his bedroom door, they would take off their clothes, and Kyle would lie on top of Phil beneath the duvet. They would stay that way for twenty minutes – eyes open, arms dead-straight by their sides, chests swollen with held breath – and they wouldn’t move an inch.

One day, Maggie walked in. She had waited for her friends for hours. When they didn’t come, she called to Phil’s house, then Kyle’s house, then she ran up the stairs, two steps at a time. She exploded into the room and saw them in bed. It was very bewildering.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ they responded, panicking, scrambling for white lies. They didn’t really know what they were doing, but they understood intuitively that it was wrong, and by extension, that they were bad. It was critically important that no one ever knew.

Maggie said, ‘I have to go have lunch now,’ even though it wasn’t even midday yet. She ran out the door and the boys wordlessly agreed to never play the game again.

The next day, she told Phil, ‘I don’t care about yesterday and I’m not going to tell, as long as you let Kyle push me and only me in the trolley for the next three weeks.’

Phil agreed that this was a reasonable deal.

For the next three weeks, Maggie rode through the estate like a queen.

Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna, published by 4th Estate, is out now.

Portrait by David Evans