Ask The Author: Jack Nicholls

Jack Nicholl’s piece “Adrian Dumpleton” appears in the special London Calling Issue. He answers questions about keepie-ups, competition and various American and non things.

1. What could you grate on your abs?

Nothing. However, I can zest a lemon using only my lower back.

2. What are “keepie-ups” and why should we learn them?

[1]
a) Take a soccer ball.
b) Flick it into the air with your foot.
c) Flick it into the air again with your foot. If you want, you can use your knee.
d) Congratulations! You have done a ‘keepie-up’.
Well, you haven’t actually. You need to do at least four or five in a row before you can really say that you’re ‘doing keepie-ups’: any less and you’re sort of cavorting with a ball and all the other kids laugh at you even though you’ve been practicing for ages at home and you still can’t do more than two or three but that doesn’t matter because you’re a grownup now, I’m a bloody grownup.
 
[2]
You should do keepie-ups because one day you will have to acknowledge that you don’t love your partner any more. Your silences will have grown less comfortable; the feel of their skin makes you want to destroy sex. You will decide to break up with them in a nice-enough restaurant that neither of you have visited before. You will look at them as they stupidly tuck into their spaghetti carbonara, and you will realise that there are absolutely no words to say that won’t make both of you feel miserable for the next six months.
 
 At this point, if you know how to do keepie-ups then you can stand up, pull a tennis ball from your pocket, bounce it on your foot or knee ten times, kick the ball into their dinner so sauce gets on their shirt and then run from the restaurant and never speak to them again. If you don’t know how to do keepie-ups, that option is not available to you.
 
3. How challenging is it to write from a woman’s perspective?

I don’t think that I have ever written from one.
 
4. Who would you compete with to get the one you love?

I’m from the fifth smallest city in Britain. We have a lot of hanging baskets and a new statue of a naked man playing a drum. When it was unveiled, the local newspaper ran a think piece on pornography. Occasionally the paper also features stories about a homeless man who defecates in the streets during the wintertime so that he can be in prison while it’s cold outside. If I had to compete with anyone, I fancy my chances against him.
 
5. What part of yourself would you want wallpapered?

I would like to cover my entire body with Victorian floral design wallpaper and then never have to wear clothes again. It would have to be Victorian floral design though, because then it would be quite formal and I could still go to work.
 
6. What American soft drink are you most hooked on?

When I first moved to America I began to miss all of my favourite English soft drinks. Where was Fizzly Popsnort? Uncle Grandad’s Sippin’ Syrup? Diet Clump? As a substitute, I began a love affair with that blue Mountain Dew, which is curiously enough not fictional.