Giving up the dry facts and getting creative...

I had looked forward to this bank holiday weekend because I wanted to use it to get on with the book I am supposed to be writing on my mum and in particular the seven years she spent at Brockhall in the sixties. But it's now Monday and, whilst I've read a little on the wider subject, I have struggled to write a complete and coherent sentence. This morning I became enthused at the thought of giving up the biography and writing it instead as a novel. This is because there are far too many emotional knots that are from being unravelled. I can also take some strength from the fact that many other authors have also given up biography or memoir and instead turned to the semi-auto/biographical novel. It also means that more assumed storylines can be added and one doesn't need to be so impartial to the facts. It could also work out because I know very little about her time in Brockhall - the day to day stuff - and because she's from a large family there are so many different perspectives. This way could enable me to do more justice to it. I hope I can be more creative with it whilst also honouring the need I have to give my mum a voice. Some info here on using the novel format instead of what can often be dry factual works.
So I'm going to give it a go and see how I get on because anything is better than writer's block!

Mad, bad, sad - and that's just life.

It's been a little while since my last post, but then this isn't the main blog - that can be found here.
I have been so busy with the day job and with worrying about my mum's condition that I've not been able to write much the past couple of weeks. However, yesterday I bought Lisa Appignanesi's Mad, Bad & Sad - History of Women and the Mind Doctors, which has served to remind me that I'm supposed to be working on my mum's book. The hospital also said this morning that, whilst my mum is still on morphine, they have re-inserted the IV fluid tube, which they had removed for a while when they thought she was about to leave us. So that's a good sign. However, if the doctors call me a fourth time anytime soon, to say they think she's about to go imminently I think I may just crack up because when you are told that your mum is about to die there and then it sets you off on a rollercoaster of emotion, then you expect the worst - then it doesn't happen and you think, 'it's ok' and then they tell you again they think she's about to go, then again... and every minute at work I'm thinking, when is the phone going to go to say she's gone? And every night before I go to bed I think, is this the night she goes? The prospect of losing a family member is hard enough. But then that's just how the situation is and I have little choice but to roll with it and be thankful that she is, at least, comfortable. And in the meantime I can do my best to get on with her book - giving her a voice.

The nation's health

BBC Writer's Room (www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom) has an interesting open call for 30 minute TV scripts based on the nation's health. Well, there's much to choose from with such a wide premise - obesity, depression, the state of the NHS, binge-drinking 'yoof' and middle-class lace curtain alchies, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, the nation's financial health.... Yep! Lots to choose from. I'll be having a go myself, if I can get it together to concentrate long enough in this sweltering weather.

Radio Gaga

Radio Gaga - a short story on Pulp.net

Story starters......

I was going to post this article from Philip Hensher on my main blog, where I had already posted on Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, but when I came across it I was researching the use of mental institutions as a form of social control for the preparation of the book that will tell my mum's story. I read it and apart from being struck by the terrible injustice of it all, it also struck me that this, or a similiar story could have actually intiated the idea for Barry's novel in the first place - there are certainly many parallels - apart from the Irish history. It's stories like this that spur many writers into action - wanting to tell the story of people they've have never met, but they have found very moving. That's why newspapers are important to writers!! They're full of stories of silenced voices crying out to be brought back to life and in so doing highlighting wider social issues.

The Carousel - A Saga

Here’s the first 17 pages worth (of over 400!) of The Carousel, A Saga. It is rather autobiographical and some have said quite gritty, which usually means that, in both literal and reading terms they’ve stuck to suburbia and have never been to a council estate! Anyway, I have been working on The Carousel for almost two years and am still chipping away at it. You will soon see that it is divided into character parts, indicating who the focus is on - this was a recent change as I felt it looked and read much more clearly and gave more to the characters, because it's about a large family and I didn't want to 'lose' any of them in the narrative, as some frequenly do in any large family. B

The Carousel - A Saga

---Part One---

Evie & Lola

The house looked stable from the outside. Orange brick, identical to the two other council houses in the row that made up Straw Man’s Walk. A few changes had been made in an attempt by the council to keep up with the times. uPVC window frames had replaced the long rotten wooden ones – even the nearby park, recently named Gartside Gardens and a sign to proclaim as much, had been bestowed with a few new benches, although upon closer inspection the benches each displayed a rectangle plaque informing all that they had been ‘kindly donated’ by Manchester University – as though keen to show that the days of Jude the Obscure were long gone. But if anyone scratched hard enough they would feel the wrath of young and old alike on the Gartside estate, a wrath often superseded by the day to day detritus of hand to mouth life. And sickness. At number one Straw Man’s Walk Evie and Lola Tully stood a step apart in the small kitchen. Their eyes were locked onto each others but their focus was elsewhere. They were frozen by a fear, the source of which was their Dad’s bedroom.

Anyone observing this scene from a few feet’s distance would have put Evie at twenty, max, and Lola at about eighteen, but they would be wrong. Evie was twenty nine, Lola, twenty seven. Yet the fear they felt was no different from that of two decades before, deep in childhood.

“Oh God Evie, what we gonna do?” Lola suddenly asked. She began to sob, tearlessly – her shoulders stiffly bobbing up and down.

Evie pressed her hand against her forehead, as if taking her own temperature, pressing harder because she couldn’t believe whether it was the heat of her hand or of her head. She continued to eyeball her younger sister, “fucking hell Lola, it’s really bad this time, we’re gonna have to get mommy.”

Lola’s shoulders came to an abrupt halt and she gave her sister’s prognosis a deep dramatic sigh, but the whinge still cloyed to the pit of her voice.

“Get mommy? What the fuck can she do? That’s if we can even find her!” She took the few steps to the window ledge and rested her head onto her elbows; thinking – trying to think.

“Well you think of something better then, there’s no point in going back round the doctor’s…” Evie lowered her tone to hush level, “I’m gonna go up and see how he is,” she said, and left her sister alone at the window ledge.

Lola listened to Evie’s footsteps on the dirty wooden steps – all fourteen of them, then to the familiar creak of her father’s bedroom door as it was pushed open with a hesitation upon which worry thrived. Lola pushed her right hand through her slightly greasy yet thick light brown hair, unconsciously feeling for the tiny pocks of dry skin she sometimes found, which she was sure were due to stress. She continued to stare through the cut out patterns of the greying piece of net curtain – just to the back fences of the houses opposite. Murphy, one of their three black cats, sauntered by until, sensing Lola’s observance, stopped. He looked up at her for a few seconds, blinked and held to a narrow slit, then licked himself, looked up at her again then resumed his saunter round to the back garden.

Minutes later Evie was back in the kitchen, staring at the floor and biting her bottom lip at the same time. The low drone of the old radio whose home was the kitchen window ledge now came into earshot – a ‘Golden Oldie’ their mother would have loved – ‘The Shadows’, proclaimed the false enthusiasm of the DJ – and on came all guitars and no gumption.

“He’s in a right mess up there Lola, the bag’s burst and… oh God! … Never thought we’d have to be doing this – at our age.”

“Our age? What about his age?” Lola asked. Their dad was fifty eight. Now facing her sister, she leant backwards against the window ledge and folded her arms across her chest, just like one of their mother’s once habitual pose. All both sisters could really think about was how on earth they were going to face, then clean, the excrement that had exploded out of their dad’s colostomy bag, get him in the bath, then bathe him and… and then… what? He had deteriorated rapidly in the past few years – had become that cliché – a shadow of his former self.

*

Conor

Conor Tully had begun work at the age of thirteen, in 1961, wringing the necks of geese, ducks and chickens in the small South Western Irish town of Bally--. These were his wringing sixties. The work was no less than what his seven or so older brothers had done before him, although his five sisters had escaped the slaughter for the usual domain of house and stove. However, like all his brothers before him there came the time when, at sixteen or seventeen years old, he could never remember which, Conor Tully lied about his age and boarded a boat – not for England, but for Scotland. It was as though by not aiming for England he was somehow being wiser. He wanted to escape the experiences brothers and friends with brothers had relayed back to the town, stories of homelessness, drunkenness, and complete fecklessness, a lot of lessness and messness anyhow. But that wasn’t meant to be.

Conor Tully arrived in Edinburgh and met up with one of his brothers who had already lived there for a couple of years, already married with two small children. Whilst Conor was lucky enough to get digs with a view of Holyrood Castle the day to day life was no different from what it would later prove to be in Manchester. Throughout all these times, however, the one constant escape were his reminiscences of nights at The Carousel.

A night club situated between several small West of Ireland towns, most of which began with Bally-, The Carousel attracted hordes of desperate and giddy teenagers tanked up on poteen, or whatever else they could get their hands on. Those nights, desperate as they were at the time, having to cadge a lift in some pick up or cattle truck, or having to walk home along miles of dark, unmarked roads in the shivering cold for hours and hours, (almost a pilgrimage in itself), took on a mythical status in Conor’s mind. ‘Sure, those were the days’, he’d often say out loud to himself.

His brother and his brother’s wife left Edinburgh for Birmingham, London, Liverpool, perhaps it was Northampton, somewhere; they were all the same, really. Conor was adamant he was going to stay in Edinburgh. But within weeks he had been laid off his labouring work, and then fell behind on the rent of his Holyrood digs. Full of shame he

crept out early one morning, like the character from some Dostoyevsky doorstopper that he would never read. He continued to look for work whilst, at nights, slept on a bench in Edinburgh’s main train station. ‘It’s going to work, it’s going to work’ he would silently chant to himself through these nights, the chant in the rhythm of an old steam train. Whenever a day’s work came along he managed to get to the launderette and the public baths. But he eventually conceded that it wasn’t going to work because he wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t meant to be, that’s also what he said out loud to himself, ‘arragh… it’s just not meant to be’, and that replaced the old chant. It was a much uttered saying that coincided with the news that another of his brothers had found a steady job with an Irish firm in Manchester. And so to Manchester he went. He had to aim for England after all.

Manchester offered no digs that matched anything remotely similar to a view of Holyrood; instead he managed to get a dinky, stale room next to another of his brothers’, in rooms above an old shop in Moss-Side.

Moss-Side was an area already known as Little Harlem, for its high population of Afro-Caribbeans, many of whom, like him, were just scratching a living, just getting by. It was as if the Caribbean men and the Irish men had made an unspoken pact – the former would go to the buses and the railways, the latter would go to the roads. And they would meet and utter a few words, or just a nod of the head, on a Saturday afternoon in the teeming bookies. And Conor was to stay on the roads, digging them up, going underneath them, fixing them, and tarring them. He did this, diligently, and with pride, for over thirty years, until struck down and fitted with a colostomy bag.

*

Evie & Lola

Evie and Lola left the house, making sure not to slam the front door behind them. Lola lit a cigarette and passed it to Evie who took a deep drag of it, watching its end blaze deep orange whilst forming a quick top hat of dark grey ash. She blew out the smoke like it was an act of defiance at the world. ‘Fuck. You!’ the smoke seemed to say. The health centre was only around a couple of corners but all Evie could think of was Evelyn, the main character of the short story of the same name in Dubliners, by James Joyce. Ever since she had read it, it had lodged itself deep into her psyche and served as a frame of reference, offering stabs of identification, leaving her hoping her own fate would not be that, not that – to which she would counter argue with herself that ‘it fucking wouldn’t’, that she was going to have a life, ‘far away from this shite hole of a Gartside estate…’ regardless of anything else. She only had two more years of her degree, then a year on PGCE then she would be a teacher and get the hell away. A pull of regret always hit her when she thought of the mindless and meaningless years spent working as a chambermaid, then a barmaid, then back to a chambermaid; always a maid, regardless, and she didn’t want to become an old maid. During the first semester of the foundation year she had soon been introduced to Marx’s concept of Estranged Labour. In the end it had brought tears to her eyes, not stabs but tears of identification.

Outside the health centre Evie and Lola took the last drags of their cigarettes and flicked them away into the distance. It was a run down two storey pre-fabricated building adorned with graffiti void of either talent or meaning. A circle of gaunt drug addicts loitered by the door, like the living dead, Evie always thought, hollow and yellow. There were a few in the foyer too. Evie and Lola recognised a number of them from their schooldays, anonymous young faces that had held no purpose, it now seemed with the luxury of hindsight. She reminded herself that she had, at least, escaped that particular fate. So far. Ce sa ra, sa ra. She had taken speed a few times whilst working as a barmaid and had gone down to six stone, which was obviously no good, and something, fortunately, that she had also quickly realised.

The waiting room was a depressing sight – just like the DHSS – kids running round the place, high on fizz and E-numbers; screaming, laughing, swearing their little fucking heads off, throwing tantrums, or worse, were silent and sullen – some of their young mums, bare legged or in track suits, waiting, always waiting. That too, Evie told herself, was another fate she had escaped. So far. It wasn’t that she didn’t want kids, she did, but not like that, alone, round there – on the estate. Any estate. They waited in line at the reception desk which had recently installed a square of Perspex for the protection of the reception staff. Lola kept on shifting her weight, all eight stone of it, from one hip to the next, and sighing dramatically, as if wanting the entire health centre to hear and acknowledge her urgency. Their turn finally came. The young, tired looking receptionist didn’t even ask ‘what?’ or ‘yes?’ but just about raised her eyebrows slightly, regally, and waited to be informed.

“It’s me Da, my Dad…” Lola began.

“Whose your dad?” the receptionist drawled.

Lola hardened her gaze. Evie stepped next to her sister.

“Conor Tully, he’s with Doctor Patel. You know damn well who me Dad is, you’ve seen us here with him enough fucking times!” Evie said.

It was the receptionist’s turn to give a dramatic sigh this time but she checked her computer as she did, tapping her fingers on the noisy, dirty click-clack keyboard.

“Right!” she said, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “So what’s the problem?”

“He’s really bad – he can’t get out of bed,” Evie said.

“Yeah, Doctor Patel needs to come and visit him this time… whether he wants to or not,” Lola added.

“He can’t get outta bed?” the receptionist repeated. “Has he tried?”

Lola looked at Evie, the exasperation crossing it like a black cloud on an already grey day.

“His colostomy bag’s leaked and…” Evie said in a lower voice.

“His what’s leaked?” the receptionist asked in a higher and suddenly more animated voice.

Lola pushed her face to within an inch of the Perspex, cleared her throat and shouted: “His colostomy bag! It’s leaked. He’s lying in his own shit and piss!!”

Evie could feel all eyes on hers and Lola’s back, but then told herself that they could bloody well look all they fucking well liked.

“Well I don’t know when he’ll be able to get away from surgery, but I’ll ask him,” the receptionist said, shrugging her shoulders.

“Right! Fine!” Evie replied.

“Fucking bitch,” Lola said as soon as they were outside.

“Whose a bitch? That woman behind reception? Nah, she’s not a bitch, she’s a proper hard faced cunt is what she is,” one of the addicts said, trying to keep pace with the sisters.

Lola and Evie gave no reply. Lola took out a cigarette and only when she had placed it in her mouth did she realise her mistake.

“Gis a fag love, yeah?” the addict said.

Lola raised her eyebrows at her sister, reached back into her cigarette packet and passed one over. Evie had already taken a few steps away – she only had a few left.

“Where we going?” Lola asked as she followed Evie in the direction of the parade of shops.

“We should try and get mommy,” she said.

“God! Great.” Lola replied.

Just before they reached the parade of shops they turned left into a maze of small two storey buildings, each housing four flats; all were overlooked by a twenty-seven storey block where most of the addicts lived, interspersed amongst rarely seen OAPs who, if they did emerge, was usually only during the hour or so after dawn.

“Which one do you think it is?” Lola asked, looking at the numbers of the first building’s flats.

“I dunno…”

Their attention was drawn to a small huddle of winos, congregated by a half collapsed wall behind the English chip shop. There were six of them – all ageing – three of whom held bags of chips, sharing with the other three. All of them either had a bottle of wine, cider or can of Special Brew, if not in their hand, then beside them. A dirty chain smoker’s cackle rose up and one of the women opened her mouth wide enough to show the world her almost toothless gums. It was Evie and Lola’s mother.

“Go and get her Lola,” Evie said, pushing her sister forward.

“I’m not going near that lot! You go!” Lola said, turning round and pushing her sister’s shoulder.

Evie tutted and strode forward.

“Evie? Where you going?” her mother called out.

“Is this one of yours then Jane?” one of the men asked.

“Yes, it’s Evie, my daughter, ooh and look, there’s perky over there. What’s the matter Lola, what you doin’ stood over there? Ashamed to be seen with your own mother are you?”

Lola sighed, shook her head and approached the group.

“It’s Da,” Evie said.

“Oh God! What’s up now?” Jane asked, her naturally narrow eyes widening, waiting.

“Ooh, it’s your old man, something’s wrong,” one of the wino women said, and waited for Evie to unfold the eagerly anticipated drama. Evie threw the woman a dirty look then back other mum.

“He needs you,” Evie said, as if she could hardly believe what she was saying.

“Me? What does he need me for?” Jane asked.

Evie looked at each of the three men, one of whom looked like a clapped out traveller/gipsy type, one of whom looked severely mental, and the other who just looked drunk and down and out. She wondered which of these men her mother was now shacked up with.

“We’ve called the doctor out, he’s really bad… we’re scared,” Evie said.

For an instant mother and two daughters shared a look. Jane picked up her can of Special Brew, took two greedy gulps, then threw the empty can across the half bald, dog shit and needle littered grass beside the wall and followed the girls back to Strawman’s Walk. All three women walked in near silence the five minutes it took them to return to the house.

Jane didn’t wait to be asked, the minute she had followed the girls into the house she went upstairs. Evie and Lola looked at each other then went back into the kitchen and waited. They stood in silence, Evie leant against the work surface, Lola against the window ledge, listening as their mother coaxed their father out of his bed, his pit, Jane would have called it. They heard the noisy boiler creak and moan into action as the water ran into the long porcelain bath that, thankfully, was yards from his bedroom.

“I’m glad she came,” Evie said.

“Yeah,” Lola said.

*

Evie spread the spare clean sheet over her father’s bed, the mattress now with no protection as even that, the protector, along with everything else that had been on the bed she had stuffed, whilst retching and heaving, into a black rubbish bag.

Jane slowly guided her husband back into the room. Their dad was barely conscious – taking small toddler steps, his hair sticking up, next to their toothless and half drunken mother. Evie and Lola began to sob at the sight before them. Jane gave no acknowledgement of her daughters’ sudden tears, as though they were doing nothing more than talking about the weather. There was no time to wipe their eyes as the front door received three short authoritative raps.

*

Jane flitted from one room to the next, surveying what, if anything, was new or different in the few months since she had left. The dining room table still held stacks of books, several piles of freshly washed clothes sat on the old welsh dresser, the dresser that Conor had found in a skip, carried back and sanded down; the living room had a few different ornaments, a big brown ceramic cart horse – ‘Conor again!’ No different from Steptoe, she had always thought – picking up useless nick nacks from flea markets the length and breadth of Manchester. Evie and Lola took up their familiar poses in the kitchen. They moved only when they heard Doctor Patel’s footsteps on the stairs.

“He’s only been up there two minutes,” Lola exclaimed.

“Ssshhh!” Evie said and went to meet him in the hallway.

“He’s just not taking his tablets,” the doctor told Evie, not bothering to hide his displeasure at having to make a home visit.

“It’s more than just that, it has to be,” Evie said.

“Listen. He’s dehydrated is all, he needs plenty of fluids and he must take his tablets,” Doctor Patel said then wasted no time in letting himself out.

“Where is he?” Lola asked as she arrived in the hallway.

“Gone? He can’t even have examined him or anything!” Evie spat the words out.

“Well. You know what these doctors are like, no time you see…” Jane said, twiddling a section of her frizzy grey/brown/bleached hair. It wasn’t long before she too had seen herself out, keen to return to her boozy playmates.

*

Conor

Conor wondered if there would be a tunnel of white light; whether his parents would be there to greet him. He had barely known either of them in this life. Would they look the same? Would he? He was just nine years old when his dad had died, but his dad had been seventy-two. He had been twenty when his mother died, but he hadn’t been told until he was twenty-one. It was 1968. Conor had been found in his Moss-Side digs in a pool of blood, by his brother, or a neighbour perhaps, he never did discover who had been responsible for saving his life. When he woke up he was in intensive care at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. A clot, haemorrhage, the doctors said. They had had to remove half a kidney. He spent his twenty-first birthday in there whilst his brothers and sisters had returned to Ireland for their mother’s funeral. She had been fifty-seven. She’d spent nearly thirty years giving new life to the world and then pneumonia took hold and carted her away.

He hated Doctor Patel, fucking useless eejit, hadn’t he always told the girls not to bother calling him out? The last time Evie had made him go round there, to the ‘health’ centre, was for his depression, but all Doctor Patel had said was that he should be grateful for what he had, a roof over his head – ‘many people do not even have that’, almost wagging a finger at him. As if that verbal slap around the head was going to take the depression away and suddenly make him interested in life again. Eejit. He knew he was talking about the homeless, not in this fucking country, but in India, or Pakistan, or wherever the fuck he was from. He was a useless eejit all the same.

Hadn’t Jane been around? Didn’t Jane just bathe him? That was a miracle if she had, considering she had long ago stopped bathing even for herself. He should never… arragh… to hell with the lot… better off dead out of it…

*

Tired Waves, Vainly Breaking

This is a small opening section from my short novel, Tired Waves, Vainly Breaking. The title comes from a line in Arthur Hugh Clough's poem, 'Say not the struggle nought availeth'. It is about one woman's retreat from the busy world to the solitude of the Western Fjords in Iceland. The boxes with the descriptions are what I hope will be line drawings as I feel the market is embracing more and more graphic novels and this takes just a bit of that and makes it, hopefully, feel more laden with emotion, poignancy. It is also influenced by the spare prose styles and stories of a few of my favourite novels, like The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding, Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan, and Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, yet their reclusive characters are all men, whilst mine is a woman, one who remains throughout without a name. Let me know what you think by emailing belwebb@hotmail.com

The only sounds were three – my breath, the efficient swish of my well-padded clothes, and the familiar tight cotton wool crunch of snow underneath my boots. Sights were not much more. White, everywhere around – save for mounds of red and grey in the far distance, and a blanket of blue, above. And a kilometre away, a compact log cabin that had a window on either side of the door, and a steady chug of steam from its chimney.

LOG CABIN WITH SMOKING CHIMNEY

Home.

*

I stamp the white off my boots. The cabin is warm when I enter. I kick off my boots and put the new batch of firewood onto the kitchen counter. Fresh food supplies will arrive tomorrow. Per the farmer who, at seven miles away, is also my nearest neighbour, drives them up for me once every two weeks. I unzip myself out of my insulation. I pour myself a coffee from the still warm pot then take a seat. I have earned this sit down. I feel as though I am sinking through the cushion. I put my feet up on the coffee table. A few books are in a pile – books whose worlds I am looking forward to travelling through. But not this instant. I rest my head back against the cushion and close my eyes, my hands wrapped around the mug, warming.

Woman seated, legs up on table, eyes closed, hands wrapped around steaming mug.

What price, peace?

Yet I am hit by the familiar old hurt. Hurts. We all have them, yes, I know. This is another thing. Being by myself I can just about manage my life. Mine. But back there…

No time to stop and stare.

No time to weep when it was necessary.

The tears flowed freely this morning whilst I was chopping firewood. Chop. Cry.

Woman chopping wood whilst crying. Monty chases a bird.

Chop. Cry.

Wail.

Stop.

Chop. Cry.

Wail.

Cry.

Cry.

Cry.

Stomp home.

Where could I do that whilst staring at my computer screen, trying to look busier than what I actually was?

‘Enough. Enough. I open my eyes, take a long sip of tepid coffee, put my cup down and pick up my notebook. That is, after all, one of the reasons why I came out here. I had eventually broken through, you see, back there, had had my first novel published, a few good reviews, a few mixed – still, the publisher just about made his money back, and I just about earned my nominal advance. The persistence of years of trying to get that first novel published had been, with hindsight, like climbing Everest, but then when I thought I had climbed it, realised I had only just got to a little ledge a few feet up. People found out at work. Assumed I would be able to just give in my notice and leave it all behind. Just like that.

Ha!

I had needed my job more than ever. Then it hit me that nothing was ever going to get me out of that race.

Woman with face like ‘The Scream’, pulling her hair, amidst a large group of commuters crossing London Bridge.

Out of bad faith. Out of it.

Out of it.

I had tried all that too. Out of it on drugs, drink, whatever. Men.

Woman staggering, with drink in hand, in front of line of leering men.

When I think too far ahead about letting all this out, telling you, whoever you are, I become overwhelmed. Even out here. But that’s ok. I operate at a different pace out here.

I am nearly forty. Life begins at… I am supposed to be in turmoil at the sound of my biological clock.

Tick. Tock.

Woman staring, wide-eyed, at clock, her hair has sharp strands of grey.

Held prisoner by bottles of hair dye, botox and a yogalates guru much in demand by the Notting Hell/Hrimrose Pill Set. Yet instead of dreading solitude I embraced it. I had always wanted to. The Brontes would have embraced greater solitude had they lived long enough… of that I am sure. Austen though, she would never have embraced it, she would have been the old woman in the corner, still scribbling her supposedly canny observations of social goings on.

Jane Austen in corner of society ball, scribbling away with her quill.

Emily. Anne. Charlotte? They’d have stomped through snow, breathing hard, and chopped wood, whilst roaring, wailing, crying. Then spat it out onto a blank page and offered it to the world. There! My pain. Bramwell would have come and gone, digging the vein.

Bronte sisters stomping through snow with axes and shovels and books. Bramwell perched against a tree, digging the vein.

But his sisters would have been there for him, no matter what. Just like I had tried to be for mine. I have brothers. Four. And sisters. Two. When I was a child, just to get five minutes peace I would lock myself in the empty shed and smoke a cigarette I had stolen from my mother’s packet. In the dark, the key to the shed cold in one hand, the cigarette in the other, thinking. How to get out of this place. This life. Come on, think, you need the plan sorted out in your head. Now. Hurry. I was twelve years old. Thirteen, perhaps. It took years to realise that I just had to do it. The simplest things can be the hardest to grasp – to execute. I get up and boil some water. There is something beautiful in having to fill the big pan from the cold water tap and waiting for the water to boil. Time to stop and stare. It’s an act of meditation. I watch as the water warms, then slowly the bubbles become more and more until it’s steaming my face open and my eyelashes become sticky.

Woman staring into pan of bubbling water – steam.

I lift the pan off the stove and pour the water into a washing up bowl then add a drizzle of detergent. I throw in an old cloth and add some cold until it’s just about bearable to my rapidly reddening hands. I love feeling the hot soapy bubbles. I’ve never been one for rubber gloves. Marigolds! I bring the bowl to the side of the front door, crouch down, and start on the skirting boards. Stained oak. It runs round the room that holds both the kitchen and small sitting area. I wring out the cloth and begin to rub it across the first section of skirting. I like the sound of cloth against wood. I like watching the steam rising off the cloth and my own hand, then rising chiffon like against the wall above the skirting before disappearing forever. I would never have done this back there. There was no point. Here it is cultural. The cleaning is cultural. Questions hover above my head now, such as how I’m going to tell you this story.

Woman on hands and knees, cleaning, with question marks hovering above her head.

Story. Such an odd word. Implies falsehoods. Yet those I want to share with you are anything but. I continue around the skirting, taking longer than is efficient. I don’t want to be efficient. I am not a robot. It took a long time to stop living like one. Stop feeling like one.

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Welcome to WIPs

I have created this new blog in order to post excerpts from my works-in-progress (wips) and also to keep track of what I'm going. It's like a semi-public showcase and tracker. I will also use it to record the process of writing my next work which I hope is going to be a fairly research intensive book telling the story of my mum's seven years spent at Brockhall home for the 'mentally subnormal' in Lancashire during the sixties as well as a wider story of her life. And besides, we're living in a new media world now and in for a penny, in for a pound and all that. I haven't yet decided from which wip I'll post first, but more soon.