Read an extract from 'The King is Always Above the People'

It was the year I left my parents, a few useless friends, and a girl who liked to tell everyone we were married, and moved two hundred kilometres downstream to the capital. Summer had limped to a close. I was nineteen years old and my idea was to work the docks, but when I showed up the man behind the desk said I looked scrawny, that I should come back when I had put on some muscle. I did what I could to hide my disappointment. I'd dreamed of leaving home since I was a boy, since my mother taught me that our town's river flowed all the way to the city.

I rented a room in the neighbourhood near the port from Mr and Mrs Patrice, an older couple who had advertised for a student. They were prim and serious and they showed me the rooms of their neat, uncluttered house as if it were the private viewing of a rare diamond. Mine would be the back room, they said. There were no windows. After the brief tour we sat in the living room, sipping tea beneath a portrait of the old dictator that hung above the mantel. They asked me what I was studying. All I could think of in those days was money, so I said economics. They liked that answer. They asked about my parents, and when I said they had passed on, that I was all alone, I saw Mrs Patrice's wrinkled hand graze her husband's thigh, just barely.

He offered to lower the rent and I accepted.

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'The King is Always Above the People' will be printed in full in Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2. To subscribe to Granta and receive the entire issue free, or to buy a copy of Granta 97, click here.