Over the years, I’ve started writing many works of fiction and finished a few. The other day I came across this one. These are the first four paragraphs. Do you think it’s worth continuing?
Sally-Anne McTell was born clinging to wreckage. The wreckage in this case was her mother, Wendy, who had been abandoned on a beach by her boyfriend, Roger, seven months through her pregnancy. Many of her friends saw this as a despicable, cowardly move on his part, because Wendy had a hard time struggling back through the soft sand and on to the promenade. Roger’s friends saw it as justified desperation, because Wendy was a pessimist – not just looking on the black side of things, but on the even blacker side of the blackness. She did not see how anything could possibly turn out well. In her experience, it never did.
“It’s all right for you,” she told an incredulous Roger. “You can go out to work. I’ll have to look after it every day. I’ve got a degree, you know. It will probably be ill, or brain-damaged.”
Roger said he did not believe brain damage was hereditary, and in any case the child might with any luck take after its father. This may have been a mistake. In response, Wendy detailed at length the ways in which she hoped the child would not turn out to be like its father, and Roger decided he wanted nothing more to do with either of them. His flat was empty by the weekend, and his sickly white saloon car was never seen in Norfolk again.
All of which was rather ironic, because the father of Wendy’s child was in fact a geography teacher who had met her one night in a pub on the seafront when Roger was in Peterborough. As they were both drunk at the time, neither of them remembered having sex behind the Marina Centre, though Wendy was puzzled to find sand in her stilettos the next day. As Wendy was in the habit of sleeping with Roger, she naturally assumed he was the father. In fact, he was sterile, but he did not find this out until much later, when he was living in Camden, Maine, with an optimistic waitress called Camille…