You are working in a Korean restaurant in Scarborough as a dishwasher and you live above it with your wife and kid. You are not Korean. Your wife is not Korean. But somehow your kid is Korean. He chatters away with the waiters and kitchen staff downstairs in a language that is incomprehensible to you and your wife and at night he cries if you do not give him kimchi.

You think this is it, your life, your mortal lot, but then one day your wife tells you she is leaving you. Her and the kid. But you’ll be back, you say and, trying to make a joke of it, you say, like Arnold Schwarzenegger? If you were like Arnold Schwarzenegger, she says, I wouldn’t be leaving. And now you know she is not joking. She loves all of Schwarzenegger’s films, Commando, True Lies, Terminator 1 through 3, even Pumping Iron which isn’t even a film in your eyes. Just Arnie walking lubed and semi naked across beaches, in gyms, diving into waves.

Being a passionate film buff you have had many arguments about your wife’s choice of movie hero, have argued that Tom Cruise is far superior to Schwarzenegger, it is undeniable!, but whenever you mention Cruise’s name your wife snarls at you, snaps, That pussy! He’s barely even five feet tall. And have you seen his weeny dick? You have not, you admit, you have not seen Tom Cruise’s weeny dick and in your rages of jealousy you sometimes wonder how she has achieved such a feat.

You imagined, on leaving you, that your wife would go to her family in Filey, loving parents who ask you disdainfully each time they see you how your writing is going, have you written any bestsellers yet? Then they ask you, without pausing for breath, how you are doing in the restaurant industry, sorry, they curl back their lips, the dishwashing industry? Whatever that is.

But then the postcards start coming in, addressed to you, K, and signed from her, P, your wife.

They are not from Filey.

First there is one from Paris, a picture of the Eiffel Tower on its front, then Nice, Greetings from Nice!, then Venice, a jaunty gondola bobbing on a canal. In each one she, your wife, tells you not to worry. She is fine. And that Adolf is still speaking Korean. Adolf is your kid. It’s not his real name but you used to call him it as a baby for a joke and now it is all he will answer to.

You often wonder if your life is a series of mistakes. One mistake after another after another. Ad infinitum. Ad Astra. Etc.

You are not rich, do not own a car, underpants without embarrassing worn patches, and you wonder how your wife is affording to travel across Europe with your son. It keeps you awake at night. Sometimes you think your wife has met a rich Frenchman with tight buttocks and a thin moustache, that this Frenchman is making love to your wife passionately on silk sheets while Charles Aznavour plays quietly in the background. And other times you imagine your wife destitute, busking on the Champs-Élysées, belting out the hits of Sia, Sade and Dolly Parton in her terrible voice, your son accompanying her on two soup spoons, his eyes wide with hunger, wondering what he has done to deserve this life. Like the rest of us. Including his dad.

But now that your family has left you you discover you don’t have to spend many hours paying your wife little complements to keep her sweet, wipe your son’s fetid bumhole after each and every pooh, fret over an English-Korean dictionary wondering whoever made up this hellishly difficult language, and with so much free time on your hands you decide you will finish the bestseller you have been working on for many years. It is about a dishwasher in a hotel called the Flamingo, and all the things he gets up to and the life that brought him there. But on rereading the book it upsets you. It is too close to your own life. And who would want to read this shit anyway?

In an act of despair you get horrendously drunk on cheap wine you have stolen from the restaurant and call directory enquiries. You ask to be put through to Kurt Vonnegut. In America. Then Charles Bukowski. Then Richard Brautigan. But the operator is obstructive, says she cannot find such numbers for any such people, and tells you not to call back. But you think you will try one final time and this time you get a different operator, one that takes pity on you, pretends the phone is ringing, then answered, then says, yes this is F Scott Fitzgerald in a bad American accent and asks you what he can help you with. And you know it is all fake but you play along. So you tell F Scott Fitzgerald about your life, about this feeling of failure that hangs over you, about how you don’t know why your wife doesn’t love you anymore, or your kid, that you don’t know if your kid has ever said he loves you, unless he’s done it in Korean and you didn’t understand, and all you want to do is make a success of yourself, make some money, make love to your wife, hire a decent English teacher so your kid has a chance of getting on in life. Because you worry he will struggle speaking only Korean in an English speaking world.

Have you ever thought of going into the movies says this ersatz F Scott Fitzgerald. Writing scripts I mean. That is where the money is and tender is the night for the rich.

You wake up. There is another card on the mat.

Sicily is lovely at this time of the year! So green and so verdant! P.

Your head is banging but you remember the words from F Scott Fitzgerald. That is it. You are going to be a screenwriter! And you start, you start to be a screenwriter but after staring for several hours at a page, writing only Exeunt several times and then crossing it out, you realise you don’t know anything about screenwriting and so you go down to the local newspaper office and you take out a small ad.

Screenwriter partner sought. To write Hollywood blockbuster. Experience needed. Serious replies only.

Then you spend the day washing dishes. At one point Dae-hyun, the restaurant owner, comes over to you, says he hasn’t seen your wife and your kid for some time and is everything ok and you tell him she has left you.

You did right to throw her out, he says, all those men she was seeing behind your back. He tells you that often there would be two or three in the restaurant at a time awaiting their turn. Hefty moonstruck men who ate little and tipped less.

No, she left me, you say. She. Left. Me. 

As well as being a restaurant owner Dae-hyun translates Korean horror fiction into English. Often he goes off to horror conventions and will tell you about the latest book he is translating because he knows you are a writer too. Although you write comedy. Which when you think about it it is also quite horrific. You once wrote a story about a man losing his foreskin in a bizarre accident and then later in life it gets eaten by a serial killer. Your wife read that one and said you were sick and why couldn’t you write something normal?

She liked crime novels set at Christmas. She would read these even in the summer, sat in the yard of the restaurant in just a bikini, while guests at a remote hotel, snowed in, freezing, were eviscerated one by one by a bloodthirsty murderer dressed as Santa. Or she liked books with ‘girl’ in the title. There seemed to be an endless amount of these. Girl on a Train. Girl on a Platform. Girl in a Waiting-room. That these three were not even a series always amazed you.

When you finish work, your arms tired and sore as they been tired and sore so many times before you find a handwritten card waiting for you on the doormat.

I am screenwriter. Meet me the morrow. High Noon. At café at castle.

You are worried you won’t recognise the screenwriter but you pick him out straight away. He has thick glasses, strands of white hair, a number of closely-written pages spread out in front of him across the table. 

You tell him of your big money idea. A film for Tom Cruise. Huge budget. Non-stop action. Set in the future. A dying earth. A fungus. Cruise a scientist who has discovered the cure for the fungus. But who has lost his memory. And must run to many locations to find it.

The playwright scratches his head, says, Tom Cruise, Tom Cruise, never heard of him and I’ve written for all the greats. Syd James. Terry Thomas. Richard O’Sullivan. I was their go-to plot-fixer on Man About the House, season two.

When the playwright suggests you have a snifter you agree. You proceed to get horribly drunk. Again.

You wake up. You have no trousers on. No shirt. Although you are still wearing your pants. On your head. Next to you lies the elderly screenwriter. He is sporting a prodigious erection.

Act 1. Scene 1. Tom Cruise awakes naked except for a pair of underpants on his head. He has reached a new low. Indicated by ominous music. 

You stumble from your bed, grab the phone, dial the operator again and ask for F. Scott Fitzgerald. You are put straight through.

Calm down, he tells you. Hang loose. Have an Alka-Seltzer. Ditch the screenwriter.

Which you do. Having removed the underpants from your head and having put them back on in the correct position you escort the screenwriter gently from your accommodation. Then you check the doormat for a postcard from your wife. There is one lying there.

Greetings from Antalya. Having a lovely time. So many exotic ruins.

You go to the kitchen table, imagine your wife and little Adolf with a svelte Antalyan. He is a waiter in a bar. Who teaches your son Turkish and your wife the Lambada. Which she performs erotically in the bar on a nightly basis. And becomes famous across the whole of Turkey. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish President, comes to see her. Invites her to perform at the United Nations. Where he hopes her erotic dancing will bring about world peace. And it does. Your wife’s erotic dancing does bring about world peace. And Adolf becomes a fashionable name again across all the globe. With young women and men looking up to the son of the founder of world peace. Chanting. A-dolf! A-dolf! A-dolf!

On the kitchen table is last night’s edition of the local paper. Your advert is there. Circled. And also circled under it is another ad.

Lana. Please call for sensual time. Competitive rates.

You call the number.

My wife’s left me, you say to Lana. She’s sending me postcards every day from every country in the world. And I just want to have some fun.

On opening the door to Lana, she arrived exactly four minutes after you called, you were reminded of Allison Hayes in the movie Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman and you wanted to climb between her breast, snuggle there, ask her to take you to Arapahoe County, blow you in an Arapahoe fashion.

You do not even know what this means.

Your wife tells you this is one of your problems. You are a fantasist. A teenage fantasist and you are not a teenage boy anymore.

I want to feel like a teenage boy again you say to Lana and she tells you to go to your room and have a wank and then she leans forward, places a warm hand on your burning cheek, asks you how much money you have. She tells you she is hungry. So very hungry. She hasn’t eaten for days.

Heads turn as you walk along the front. Lana is in high heels. Short skirt. Her legs are so long you imagine she could step over the sea wall, reach Denmark with a single stride and you tell her this and she laughs and tells you she’s been there and it ain’t all that. Especially that Little Mermaid critter. She’s just sitting on the rocks for all to see. If I was in charge I’d monetise the bitch, put up a paywall, have a stall selling all kinds of Little Mermaid crap.

So you’re a capitalist, you say and she fires back that she’s a realist. And anyway it’s you that rang me and I don’t think you rang me to go and get chips. It’s you who said you were hungry you say and then, overcome with regret to be hanging out with a woman you were prepared to pay to have sex with, you tell her about the night before, the screenwriter, Tom Cruise, getting blotto, waking up hungover and seeing her number. I’ve got a wife and kid, you say, A-dolf. I wasn’t thinking straight.

You think she’ll comment on A-dolf, that’s what people normally do, how could you, six million Jews etc etc but instead she tells you that she loves Tom Cruise, has seen all his films about ten gazillion times, that she’s also written a few scripts in her time, that that’s what she wants to do, not be some lousy hooker, and you think this is it, finally, finally something good is happening to you

You ask her then if she wants to go into partnership, to try and write a script with you and you tell her about your Tom Cruise idea. The dying Earth. The fungus. Tom Cruise running. Tom Cruise running. Tom Cruise running. 

Show me the money, she screams startling several elderly pensioners ambling along the front. Show me the money! SHOW ME THE MONEY!

You take it this means yes and you ask her if this means yes and then she says it.

Yes, yes, YES.

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Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James and Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. His latest book, Saltburn, will be published early 2025. He is a Lambda Award finalist, winner of the Leicestershire Short Story Competition. His stories have been on Radio 4 and in various anthologies. Twitter: @drewgum