- Nik Kershaw - Wouldnt It Be Good

"You look like you sleep," Alistair said, his voice a gravelly wreck. "I haven't slept in three weeks. They’re taking the company. They’re taking the house. And she’s already gone."

By day, Julian was a "gray"—one of the thousands of office workers dressed in charcoal suits, filing papers for a ministry that existed only to justify its own existence. But by night, he retreated to a cramped attic flat in Camden, where he’d sit by the window and watch the "Luminaries." Wouldnt It Be Good - Nik Kershaw

The Luminaries were the elite, the beautiful, the people for whom the city seemed to glow. From his window, Julian could see into the penthouse across the street. There, life was a blur of silk robes, crystal decanters, and laughter that surely sounded like a perfect chord. "You look like you sleep," Alistair said, his

In Julian’s mind, if he could just step into that penthouse, his problems—the mounting debt, the crushing loneliness, the feeling of being invisible—would evaporate. He imagined that the man in the penthouse, a sharp-jawed aristocrat named Alistair, never felt the biting chill of a drafty room or the hollow ache of an empty stomach. They’re taking the house

One evening, through a fluke of a broken service elevator and a misplaced key, Julian found himself standing in the hallway of the penthouse floor. The door to Alistair’s unit was ajar. Driven by a desperate, feverish curiosity, Julian slipped inside.

He found Alistair in the living room, slumped on a designer sofa that cost more than Julian’s yearly salary. There were no guests. No laughter. Just a stack of legal documents and a half-empty bottle of gin. Alistair was staring at a photograph of a woman, his eyes rimmed with red, his hands shaking so violently he could barely hold his glass.