Trapped.

An activity from the Big Red Book - my Creative Writing Manual. Let's hope I don't want to use it in an assignment because I'm not allowed to once it's been published. I thought it was time I reached out to my followers (I lurve the thought of followers). It probably needs some editing but we have to leave it alone for a while before coming back to it. I'm leaving it here.

Write a scene in which a character feels trapped in their surroundings with no immediate chance of escape.

The few moments before take off are always a tense time. The chance of surviving a flight is at its lowest on the way up and on the way down. Once you’re up there, you are sort of disconnected from reality. The only thing realistically that could get you is an explosion – a bomb or the fuel tanks going up. I suppose a massive decompression would also finish you off. If someone opened the door or if a window blew out. Anything else would just take you back to my original comment – its going up or coming down and, in fact, it is only the coming down that is the issue. If you just keep going up, nothing can get you except the extremely unlikely happenstances that I have just described. Getting on the plane isn’t the worst part of it. Although the surroundings just close down and down around you, it is a gradual process. You transfer from the freedom of the open air, where you can breathe, although the air gets more and more tainted with petrol fumes and diesel fumes as you walk through the car park and the planes fly so closely overhead that sometimes you think their wheels could part your hair. The cigarette smoke that you have to pass through to get into any public entrance nowadays adds to that claustrophobic feeling of not being able to breathe deeply in case you set off a cancer which will kill you if the air travel doesn’t. Inside, paradoxically, the air is cleaner and it is easier to breathe. You still have a feeling of space because it is like being in a warehouse. The ceilings are high and there is space for the people – ant-like in the vastness – who scurry around, dragging their leaves (well suitcases) behind them along well worn pathways. Even channelling down into the queues for the desks is not too bad because, while there are people in front and behind and a feeling of impatience, a knowledge that if you lose concentration and don’t shuffle forward with the rest of the herd there will be a tutting and mental shoving and even the possibility of someone overtaking you, there are gaps between the queues and any barriers are either mutually acknowledged or flimsy. The queue to be probed and examined is tighter. The physical space is darker, the ceilings lower, the uniformed officials, standing with their dark blue uniforms and their blank faces and their hands on their utility belts start to crowd you slightly. The pace is slow to start with but suddenly explodes into a series of demands: put your loose change and phone in here, take off your belt and shoes, put your bags through here, take off your coat, walk this way. Of course, you get it wrong and something sets off the klaxons which add to the beating in your skull and the uniforms are suddenly in close and all around and you are given a whole new set of commands – stand still, lift your arms, open your legs and you are swept with rays that combine with the particles of burnt tobacco and petroleum  that you were forced to inhale earlier and your heart beat speeds up and your breathing is higher and faster in your chest. In and out, in and out, don’t look them in the eye, just focus on the ceiling, the low, dark ceiling, until you’re through and you need to collect your belongings and get dressed and put everything back where it belongs and make sure you’ve got your passport and tickets and boarding pass where you can reach it later and all in the two minutes they allow you. And then it closes down again. They have taken a High Street and curved in round into a circle, and squeezed it tight, then on top of that they’ve layered bars and restaurants and the space in the middle which should be the town square is filled with seats and tannoys and screens with acres of information covering a million miles and an acre of time and somewhere in there is the one small piece of information that you need and it jumps, every time you get a focus and start to close in, it jumps. Then there are the people. All those people who were so spread out in the car parks and started to compress in the check-in hall, and were hurried and scurried through the security gates are now herded into the enclosure like sheep waiting to be branded and dipped. The same sense of whirling confusion, the same bleating to locate your family group, the same staking a claim to a small piece of ground – or bank of seats – and staying there in spite of the sheep dogs harrying and the other sheep, stressed and glaring from their flat, blank eyes. The air is thick and warm and dense with a hundred perfumes from multiple choking and mismatched duty-free samples which people seem to think is their civic duty to wear when they get into an enclosed box with hundreds of other people and recycled air.  The next move is into the tunnel via the push and shove of get-on-first. You are funnelled down, devoid of light and space, the illusion of the tunnel in the distance getting narrower and you getting smaller, because you have to be smaller to get on the plane. You see them in the sky and they are small so everyone has to be reduced in stature to get them all aboard. The narrow aisles, clipping the seat backs with your hips, which haven’t been reduced quite enough for the proportions of the cattle truck planes; squeezing past the people who got there before you and are staking out their territory and filling the overhead lockers with their important stuff and are oblivious to the fact that they are blocking the aisles ahead of you while behind you the airline staff are stuffing more and more people into the plane. These people blocking the aisles are the people you might have to consider saving if the plane goes down. They’re doing themselves no favours right now. You narrow your eyes and laser them out of your way and, when that doesn’t work too well, you have to touch them intimately, belly to back as you push past. Into the seat, made for fifteenth century beings who were several inches shorter and similarly narrower. Nothing to put in the overhead lockers, just a bag to slide under the seat, between your legs, nudging the life jacket with its flashing light and oh-so-useful-in-the-middle-of-the-Atlantic whistle. Finding the seat belt, which looks distinctly frayed and fastening it tightly so that when you’re found, you’ll still be strapped to your seat in the tree tops of the Amazonian rain forest or wherever. Whistling, no doubt. The space has finally narrowed down to microwave dimensions. If you stand in the middle of the plane and stretch out your arms, you could probably touch both of those kitchen-foil-thin aluminium walls. But standing and stretching are distant memories. You sit in the centre seat between two strangers. You are tied down to this narrow seat with the arms rests biting into your slightly too opulent thighs. The overhead lockers with their loads of duty free and oversize bags which people smuggle aboard to save them precious minutes at the other end are inches above your head. The seat of the person in front, soon to be reclined to within an inch of your face is currently less than an arm length away. The sick bag gives promise of delights to come. On either side, your shoulders are compressed by those of the total strangers sharing the next few hours, their body heat is yours, their exhaled air will enter your lungs even before it can be recycled with the germs and body odours of three hundred others. The door bangs, the engines wind up, your hands grasp the arm rests, your buttocks tighten to help the uplift and you blank your mind out for the duration.

No Monkeys Here Today

This is the piece I submitted for my first Creative Writing assignment. I like it, but it didn't quite fit the criteria. The tutor liked it enough to give me some very positive feedback and a more than acceptable mark. I have learned that if you want an extrinsic reward (that bit comes from the Big Red Book that teaches us everything) you may have to sacrifice some of your creative autonomy and do what they asked you to do! 

‘Chink chink.’

‘Salut.’

The chime as the two bottles meet is the only bright sound amongst the murmuration of evening activity in the Jehangir Mahal Palace at the setting of the sun. We’re sitting on our private terrace on the roof, our evening ritual undisturbed by other guests who wander in the periphery. We have our first beer, we have each other and we are in India. This India is a place of muted tones, dirt roads from the same palette as the golden stone temples, dark, dusty greens of grass and trees and a wide, rocky river that adds silver to the azure reflection of the sky. Against this background, the vivid orange of the robes of monks and mendicants seems truly holy. There is a perfume only India can call its own. Incense and mothballs, washed but un-deodorised bodies, faded cotton sluiced in river water, bleached clean on sun-warmed rocks, warm cow and spice.

It’s swallow time. As the light begins to change, they gather to dance and weave amidst the cornucopia of the insect buffet. We are high and they are low and briefly our environments coincide. We sit enthroned, guests in a new dimension, watching swallows caracole in what we perceive as nothing. They disregard us. Leaden and grounded we are no threat to them, we cannot join them as we could in water. We can only fly in our imagination and so we watch.

The light changes. There are newcomers to the stage. Clumps of heavier, slower, noisier performers. It’s parakeet time. They bring in flashes of bright colour - the yellow of their underwings, the turquoise of their trailing tails - and noise. They squawk and bicker and the silent swallows part before their bow wave, fading into the encroaching dusk. The turrets and domes of the palace roof are black silhouettes against the vastness of a striped sky, pink through orange to a murky gray on the polluted horizon. The parakeets are passing through and in their wake is a sound low enough to be felt in the bones. A whoompf…whoompf…whoompf, rhythmic and slow, a pressure wave of warning.  The parakeets are gone. It’s vulture time. Like bombers returning from a wartime raid in some old film, they are coming home to roost in the domes of the palace. Redolent with majesty and power, their solitary passing is soundless except for that beat, felt deep within the gut. You hold your breath as they pass over, harbingers of death, dark shadows against a darkening sky.

The light has almost gone. The sun sits on the edge of the night. It is the orange of India, the orange of musky marigold garlands hanging from the mirrors of taxis, the orange of the shrines at the roadside reeking of incense. It’s bat time. The movement is a flicker at the corner of your vision and the sound is theoretically above your register but in your head it comes and goes. A cheese-wire through the matter of your brain. The insects, so relieved when the swallows left, turn to find themselves gaping into the darkness of a fast-approaching bat cave. Oblivion. The night is filled with a silent flittering, a cacophony of sound that you can’t hear, a dance that you can only sense.

It’s human time. Another beer, the temperature a very balmy thirty five degrees. We talk about the day, our voices low. We laugh about the monkeys and their diaries – we laugh about it still ten years away. Our little Indian temple guide, the one we chose from the rabble of small boys all eager to please, to earn rupees, the one who keeps the rest away, preserves our peace.

‘Where are the monkeys? Why are there no monkeys here?’

‘No monkeys here today. Tomorrow monkeys here.’

Always tomorrow in India. That’s Indian time. We carry the frustration with us, or we let it go and kick back, legs dangling over the three storey drops.  Monkeys will come. Temples will decay. Small boys will wait. On the roof of the Jehangir Mahal Palace in India it is night and we sit drenched in it. Our curry is served on our private terrace. In the marbled splendour of our rooms, Vishnu and Hanuman will guard us through the night. Tomorrow we will visit the market place, we will try to avoid the sacred cows and we will drink ice-cold, misted-bottled Coca Cola to sustain us in the heat. And then it will be swallow time again.

Walking at Night

We had to write a poem at today's tutorial. This is what I came up with.

When your Mum says don't walk home by yourself - listen!

Walking at Night

My footsteps echo off the green-slimed walls,

and bounce right back to ears that are alert

for followers. Count footfalls, one, two three.

Too many! So I stop and they stop too.

The only sound is breathing, harsh and fast.

I turn, my back against the wall that drips

cold fingers down my back. Stench of decay,

mosses and rotting things. Nothing to see

amongst the shadows cast by distant lights

of cars . They cannot help me now. Owl hoots.

Then silence and I wait. I am the prey

of someone waiting, silent, near at hand.

Fairy Tale

A long time ago in a far-away place lived an elf and a waif and a pudding. They lived in a tree made of canvas and clays and worked out in the branches. The elf was a shoemaker, as the story tells. He made shoes for leprechauns. Most of the shoes were green but on Fridays he would only make red shoes. The waif was a remnant of the Old World when Humans still existed. When the badgers rose up and silenced the guns only the waif survived, hiding in a puff dragon till the smoke dispersed. The waif was old. Infinitely, degeneratively old. She so wanted to be fat but who can be fat on mushrooms and drains? She still wore the clothes of her childhood but always had beautiful shoes. Red shoes, made on a Friday. The pudding was made of figs and honey and bark and candyfloss. It was shaped like an elephant but tiny. Fig puddings are bad for you and this pudding so wanted to be loved. It would sit at the door of the canvas tree and wail its distress at being puddingy until the elf and the waif huggled up and stroked its figgy paws and told it that they loved it. O lovely pudding, o pudding my love. At the end of the day they would wend their weary ways into the bowels of the tree and dance to the old songs until one by one they pirouetted into sleep.

Red.

This is a different sort of freewrite. I think it reached a level I don't deliberately access, I thought I'd post it because it is about depression and self loathing. I don't want to go back there. 

Red. Anger. Red mist. Blood. Roses.Red devil. Red arrows. Strawberries. Raspberries. Hips and haws. Autumnal colours. Better red than dead. Communist. Commune. Commune with nature. Life blood. Periods. Red river. Read head. Readlands.

What would happen if we were red not pink. If other races were green not black. If the Chinese were truly yellow. If we were primary colours rather than shades of flesh. Would the primary colours still be dominant? Primary. Orange would be a lesser being at it was mixed colour. Red and Yellow. Would we all end up that sludge brown. Would we have red supremacy? Red Ken. How did Socialist become red? What is the significance. Wars of the Roses. Red rose of Lancashire. White rose of Yorkshire. Purity against blood lust. Vikings. Back to the red mist. Wanting to kill. Wanting to destroy, cleave, hack apart. Knowing that sanity is within reach but choosing not to step back into it. Wanting to hurt. Rip apart. Knowing that you cannot mend it, cannot go back but not caring. The mist isn’t red, it’s black. It’s like a curtain that muffles everything except the beating of the anger. The drum beat that drives you forward, tongue lashing, aiming for the heart to belittle and destroy. To wound and maim. To make you feel as badly as I feel. The blackness the curtain when it closes when it descends muffles all feeling except the need to hurt to lash out then it closes completely and you are locked into the darkness and everything is muffled and there is no point lashing out the only one to hurt is you so you sit wrapped in the curtain of your misery and rip into your own flesh and feelings and tear yourself apart because  you obviously don’t deserve anything better. And you rock. And the voices are distant and you need to drag yourself from the velvet drugged box drag yourself up towards the sound that is disembodied coming from so far away and you drag your self towards it and focus so you can hear then the treacle of your understanding as time is slow and you take what you hear and you turn it round and round in the treacle in the slowness in the slurry until you can see what it was that was said so long ago and so far away and you consider and think is not the right word because think is and active process and the treacle slows that down and you consider what a response might consist of because finding a response is beyond you at the right newness of the moment and finally you find something to say and you find your voice locked down in the more of your being and you drag it up and open your mouth and lip the answer to the question that came so long ago then you let go and sink back down to the waiting place. And you don’t care if there’s a response or a reaction because it’s too far away and too long ago and everything is muffled and if you can’t feel how you feel how can you care how they feel or know if they feel because you know you won’t until the blanket lifts, until the curtain opens until the treacle thins until the light comes in until the sludge of your being finally warms and stirs and slither out towards the warmth and you’re never really depressed because even though you can’t see it and even if you can’t reach it and even if you don’t care if it’s there or not you know that spring will come one day you know at the heart of you that the light still exists that it’s not all darkness so you know you’re not dead even if you want to be so you’re not really depressed you’re just punishing yourself and everyone else. That’ll show them that’ll teach them not to hurt you you’ll just make them do without you for a while and be too frightened to send you back to the dark place.

Free-ranting.

I have deviated from the free-write technique and am developing one I call 'free-rant'. This is my first try at it. I don't think I have quite got the full flavour of it yet. Once I have, I will copyright it and make my fortune selling books on free-ranting to OU students embarking on their creative writing careers. I ranted so hard I had to do this in two sections! That is quite a rant.  

This is not so much a free-write as a free-rant. We went to B&Q today to get some paint for the bedroom. I knew what I wanted, A sea green a bit deeper than the quilt cover that we love so much and which would be slightly better without the dog paws on. So – no challenge. In; pick up the paint; get some painting equipment and home. Half an hour tops. Or so you thought. The first challenge was the paint area. They’ve changed it. Now, I find that rude, frankly. It worked for me before. I knew where stuff was and I could choose a colour, get it mixed and be out of there with no issues. The only minor problem was sometimes finding a woman to do the mixing but Rob was good at that. He knows my tolerance levels and would say ‘You stay there a minute.’ He’d be back in next to no time with a woman in tow (that’s my Rob) and we’d be mixed and at the check out waiting for some pleasant pensioner working the till to finish their pleasant conversation with some other pleasant pensioners before you could shake a mixing stick at it. But, as I say, they’ve changed it. There is a now a whole area dedicated to their own paint. Let’s hope it is as good as they suggest because I have five litres of the stuff. It was a slight concern that they feel the need to sell a combined primer and paint for ten pounds a pot more expensive and actually ask you if you’d prefer that, but I work on the theory that they wouldn’t sell you paint that isn’t up to the job, would they. It would be a poor selling ploy to sell you paint that has the covering power of thin custard just to get you to go back and buy the better quality stuff. Wouldn’t it? Anyway, we fooled them, we didn’t fall for the ruse. But I am so far ahead of myself. I am talking as if buying paint was simple. The first problem was working out how the system worked. We went to the wall of colours and looked at it blankly. There were hundreds, thousands of little tags with colours on. I knew the exact colour I want but it just wasn’t that simple. Trying to isolate it from the twenty other shades that were so nearly the same was difficult without taking into account that the lighting was so awful. Bright and artificial, even in a world of artificial lighting. Luckily they had three – I say again three – light boxes where you could insert your colour tag and check how it would look in such an environment.

Rant, continued.

Where did I get to? Not the counter, that’s for sure. For all the advertising, there were two tills, four people waiting and one woman serving. This would not have been as bad if two of the people waiting were not on a mission to paint their fucking bathroom the exact shade of beige that was in their nasty, cheap padded lino. It is probably called something a bit more technical (I suspect ‘nasty’ and ‘cheap’ are not actually in the name of the product). They had brought a roll of it with them so they could get the exact shade they wanted. Now, this lino was patterned with shapes and each shape was like the colour chart in ‘paint’ – lots of different shades of the particular colour palette. In this case, cream through beige to brown. Sort of streaks and spots of colour, or, in this case, lack of colour. And the woman wanted the exact shade of that bit there. No there. That little tiny bit that I have to point to with my little finger because my bigger finger is too big and would obliterate it. Never mind that all around that tiny little bit of the exact colour were little bits of colours that were really similar and if they weren’t similar they were pretty damned near or went with it beautifully because they were from the same palette. Give or take a micro-smidgeon or whatever the term is for colour difference. And they were beige. It wasn’t like she was trying not to clash. You can’t actually clash with beige because what it does best is bland. Have you remembered that one entire wall of the warehouse was covered with very small paper samples of every colour in the universe and a few they’d made up to fill the gaps? Did she take her bit of lino over there and see which colour sample looked best, using the three light boxes so considerately provided? No. She did not. She asked the sales girl to do a colour match using a scanner and computer. The scanner was not like a supermarket barcode scanner, or a webcam, either of which would have been, in my opinion, perfectly good enough. No, it was a great box of a thing and you had to insert the item you wanted colour matched into it. The roll of lino wouldn’t fit in so they had to sort of lodge a corner of it in then scan it. It took forever. Not literally, as I am home now and I assume she is too, but it took forever, if you get my meaning. She wasn’t impressed with the result as it the great block of backlit beige on the computer screen didn’t look like the infinitesimally small sample she’d provided, and so they had to do it again. And again. Then they went over to the rack of colour samples to see if the colour was there. If she’d looked before she came to the counter to hold us all up, she’d have either found it or known it wasn’t there. Though how you can not find the colour of beige you want when there are about 150 shades of beige in the beige box, I don’t know. Luckily by this time  them woman who had been mixing paint out the back came over to give the tin of paint she’d mixed to one of the people in front of us and went off to mix some paint for the other man in front of us. I started to get excited. You know what making mayonnaise is like? One drip at a time for a long time, stopping to make sure it mixes properly? Well, I think that is the method they were using. Even the woman mixing said – when it was finally our turn – that it was slow. It was slow. I took to going and finding other colour samples at this point. I’d picked the colour for the bedroom in about two and a half minutes because I knew what colour I wanted and it didn’t have to match with anything! We do clash and blend. And it’s the bedroom. It’s dark when we’re in there so I started picking colours for the kitchen. I brought them back a couple at a time, showing them to Rob and remarking how colourful the colours were. How many colours there were. I got quite smitten with the names of the samples. Mimi’s kimono. I’d have liked that one except I didn’t like the colour. But I didn’t let that hold up the whole queue. I didn’t like Mimi’s kimono in my own time. I wanted the one for the bedroom that was called Spent Passion or some such but decided on Zen for several reasons. The main one being that it was the colour I’d decided on before I came out. I also found Stratford on Avon for the kitchen and when Rob queried why it was called that I told him it was the because it was the same colour as the swans there. As it was a lovely turmeric yellow, the beige woman actually stopped whittering on momentarily but it was momentarily. I think all the serving staff had hidden and were sniggering behind the colour stands as the one poor sales girl who hadn’t move fast enough, to be honest. Once the beige lino woman and her husband, who had hair like a sheep (grey, curly and it didn’t move) had gone, they all came out of the woodwork. I bet her bath and sink are white – although avocado would be a lovely contrast to the beige lino and beige walls. End of rant. Signing out.

Gurgle

One of the techniques we have started with on the Creative Writing module is freewriting. You get a pen and paper or sit at the keyboard then you go 'bleurgh' and spill the contents of your mind in a random manner. I quite like this technique. It is familiar. It is like a normal evening after a couple of glasses of wine. I shared this freewrite on the OU forum today so I thought it only right to share it with you. Enjoy!

'Gurgle'

Gurgles of laughter from a small baby, lying naked in a warm room. Just after a bath, getting ready for bed. Laugh with their whole body, arms and legs waving, head moving, eyes on you, shining, mouth wide and open, dribble, gums, tongue. The smell of clean, warm baby. The soft squidginess of the tummy when you bury your face in there for a kiss or to blow a raspberry. Holding the baby in the air over your head with a slight startle reflex, looking down on you with that string of dribble stretching down to fall in your mouth. Total horror, moving to miss it and getting it on your cheek. Eye contact. Laughter. Snuggling in close and breast feeding. So much closer and more intimate than a bottle could ever be. The physical tug from your nipple down to the depths of you, physically and emotionally. The feeling of concentration as the milk lets down and you pour yourself and your nurture into that little being. Later, much later, the distance between you that you don't know how to bridge by words or deeds. The gurgle of water down the drain with that feeling of finality, of something over. The bath, the shower, the washing machine cycle, the rain storm. In the middle of the road the swirl of flood water as it drains away. All passion drains, it floods, it drains.

View From the Top of a Bus.

http://www.storiesfromthetop.com/writing-competition-1/

This website involves two people; one takes photos from the top of a London bus and the other writes stories to go with the pictures. They have decided to open it up to other writers and this is a double first - the first competition they have run and the first one I have entered. Wish us all luck!

The Boy.

The first time that Lynn noticed him was the day after her exam. It felt like a little piece of luxury to look out of the bus window rather than down at her revision papers. The fact that it was damp and drizzly and the colour spectrum was selected from grays did not detract from the pleasurable sense of time on her hands. It was the splash of blue against the brickwork that caught her eye and the slight movement as he glanced furtively over his shoulder. He looked for all the world as if he was having a surreptitious wee in the corner – he'd probably describe it as 'having a slash'. She smiled to herself. By the look of him, undernourished, with more than a little of the rat about him, in an oversized anorak, it was unlikely that his street cred was that high. She saw him again the next day. Same time, as the bus slowed down to join the main road, same place, same anorak and same posture. She frowned slightly. Being caught out once was a bit embarrassing, if he did that in the same place every day surely someone would be on his case. Perhaps he was hiding from someone. Perhaps the furtive glance over his shoulder was a self-protective gesture. She looked around as the bus edged towards the junction but couldn't see any other signs of life in the traffic-grimed hedging or at the blank faces of the windows above him. By the end of the week Lynn was almost looking forward to seeing him. Although she'd forget him by the time she got to work, the mystery of why he was there and what he might be doing occupied the last ten minutes of what could be a long, slow and rather tedious journey. She wondered if perhaps he was waiting for a lift to school, or for his mum to come out of the block of flats with a pushchair and possibly a couple of toddlers in tow. Perhaps he was a runner for a local drugs gang, waiting for someone to show up so he could pass on the goods. Maybe his dog was buried in the corner and he still shared a bit of his day with his former friend. As the days went by and the possibilities for new stories waned, the boy became just another part of the landscape. Occasionally she'd still notice him, on the few bright sunny days there were, standing there waiting, still in his anorak, hood round his face until just before Christmas he wasn't there. It was the space he'd occupied that caught her attention just briefly and she assumed that it was end of term and he'd be back in January. But by then she'd forgotten he was ever there. Her new Kindle fulfilled her need for stories and she rarely lifted her head until she reached her stop.

She turned and there he was...

Alerted by the thunder of four feet hitting the ground at speed, she turned and there he was, coming towards her. He loomed larger by the micro-second; head thrust forward, ears flat against his skull, mouth agape, teeth glistenening, throwing off speckles of foamy saliva. She froze, half crouched, her own mouth open in a shout that didn't have time to reach his ears. Forty kilos of perfect, black and tan, canine athleticity swerved at the final moment, swinging his back end round to take her legs out from under her. Flat on her back in the middle of the park, she looked up at the grinning jowls. He looked back at her apologetically and licked her face. 'Ooops! Soz, Mum. I need to practise that'.

This is a memory! Stimulated by a prompt from the Creative Writing module which starts tomorrow. We seem to have been waiting forever for it to start. I'm a bit conflicted with that and this right now. We can't submit anything for assessment which has been pre-published, so putting something on here automatically means I can't use it on the module. At least not in the same form. Once we know what the assessments are, I'll have a clearer idea of where we are going, so keep watching just in case! It may save you having to buy my first novel. Hahahahahahahaha!

Tired.

‘God, I’m so tired.’

My new husband – listen to that word, husband – my new husband pushed the car seat back from the wheel he’d been holding for the past three hours and rubbed both eyes with the heels of his hands. I purred slightly in the back of my throat.

            ‘I know. Right?’

The phrase ‘the cat who got the cream’ had been bandied about at the reception. My mother had been the first to say it in my hearing.

            ‘Darling, you just look so…so…satisfied’ she’d chirped.

            ‘Not yet, Mum!’ I didn’t say that out loud but that was definitely what fuelled my day-long, ear-to-ear grin. The Aunties pinched my cheeks and sighed for the passions of their youth while the Uncles resisted the urge to pinch anything and just sighed.

I pushed open the door of the car and stepped into the cool blue of the fading day. My dress, hitched up for comfort on the motorway, slithered sensually down my plucked and tanned, well-moistured thighs. The sparkles on my diamond (well, diamante) encrusted slippers peeped out below the hem. My elaborate, sprayed rigid coiffure ached for a damned good scratch and toss about. We were so close. So close.

Fifteen minutes later we sat on the edge of the bed, giggling like a pair of schoolgirls. The quick transition from desk to room was courtesy of our lateness. The clinks and murmurs from the dining room told of earlier arrivals. We’d eaten our fill at the buffet before we left in a hail of confetti, saucy suggestions and good wishes hours before. I was definitely hungry now but not for dinner. We would order from room service later. Hopefully much later.

            ‘Shall I get ready first?’

            ‘Mmmmmm’ my husband (husband!) toed off his shoes. ‘Don’t be too long. I’m really looking forward to getting into bed.’ He patted the mattress suggestively and winked.

I looked into the mirror, leaning on the marble counter to examine my face closely. First job – remove the make-up painstakingly applied so early this morning. It had lasted well but, close-up, showed traces of each proffered cheek, each kiss, each tear and innumerable glasses of sparkling wine. Second job – reapply enough to make me look fresh and appealing. He’d never seen me yet without my make-up and although the theme for tonight was naked, there were limits. Plenty of time for jaded and haggard in the years to come. 

Next job – remove all pins from nest of curls and give it a damned good shake. I bent forward from the waist and let my head hang down, fingers tousling through my hair. A flick back of the head as I stood up and there! Come-to-bed hair. So finally, and finally,  the lingerie. I’d spent so long on this. Online, in catalogues, at parties. Black, white, hint of red, lacy, racy, pants, no pants, short and tantalising or long and promising? I slithered the whisper of a thing over my head and felt it float around my skin; my skin which tingled in the slight chill of the evening and at the thought of the effect of my imminent grand entrance. 

One last look in the mirror. One last look at this girl who I’d never see again. This girl who chose to wait and paid the price. The boys who’d called her names and dropped her when they realised she meant what she said, but told their friends she did. The girls who’d laughed at her and called her frigid or a liar. It had been a long, long year of self-denial, self-discipline, yearning and whispered promises to one another and finally, finally they would do what she had wanted for so long. Her hand slipped slightly on the knob. She took a deep breath, girded her loins and opened the door. 

And there he was. Her husband. Her dream. Her hope for the future. Deeply, soundly, unrousably and snoringly asleep.

I'm not racist, but...

I writ a pome! Thank you, Louise.



'I'm not racist, but....'
Four words, five syllables
Camouflage a charade.
There is no 'but' in 'I'm not racist'
The 'but' commits you to a stance
One side or the other of a line
That segregates the 'us' from 'them'.
The policy that states
'Immigrants go home' has a strange appeal.
Apply it strictly and let's watch
Australia and the USA revert
To the original inhabitants
As all the immigrants return
From whence they came.
(I know! The grammar!)
There'll be space for them back home
As all the Vikings and non-Celts move out.
And where will you be then
Miss Racial Purity?
Miss When-in-England-do-as-English-do?
Not here, I reckon.
'I'm not racist, but...'
The world will be a better place
When you move on.

Loss

I wrote this using my non-dominant hand - which happens to be my right hand - as an exercise. It is supposed to access different areas of your brain. As I'm not sure where this came from, perhaps it worked!



Prompt: Winning or Losing



What is the loss that changed you and your life irrevocably and forever? Was it a thing? A feeling? A person? An important number? Your reputation? Your mind, your heart or - God help you - your soul?


I don’t have many things I care about deeply. Mostly they are just things. But we had a burglary when the children were much younger. An invasion of our mostly happy, always chaotic family home. I would have said it was about twenty years ago but that just shows I have also lost track of time! It would be more like thirty. 


They came in through the back door, kicking it open, splintering the frame. They stepped over one dog and we think the other showed them round. When people asked would the dogs not have been scared by the noise of the door being broken down, I had to explain that they probably thought it was my son coming home for lunch. 


The only thing of worth they took was a handful of bits from my jewellery box. Nothing there would have been of any value to them nor would it have netted them more than a few pounds. Not even enough for a night out. But they took my Mum’s ring. My Mum who had died when I was sixteen. When I lost her, I lost links - to the past, to the stories she could have told to a daughter who was too young to listen when she died. 


The ring was itself a link to her Dad. who she loved with a depth which spoke of the troubled relationship with her own mum. It was a plain little ring - just a gold band, worn by the years of contact with the fingers of people I loved. I don’t remember my Mum wearing it. I think I was told it was a plain band when my Grandad wore it and the stones were put in for my Mum but I might have dreamed that, made it up or got mixed up with another story. My mind plays these games with me. But the stones were there - two pearls like abbreviated traffic lights across the width of the band, flanked by two amethysts along its length. Worth nothing to them. Worth everything to me. 


I still occasionally look for it in the windows of second-hand shops. I bought myself a consolation ring in India. We visited a jewellery store and it was waiting for me, similar but nothing like. A sliver of a ring with a central ruby and a diamond chip either side. See? Nothing like. But I saw it and I heard my Mum and now I call it ‘my Mum’s ring’ and it fills a space and holds the memory. 

Two Short Stories (Too-short stories?)

These are two short stories written from prompts on my FB Creative Writing group. I'm really having fun doing these. They are written quickly and not 'polished'. Enjoy!

Prompt: She realised something was wrong as soon as she opened the door……

Thank goodness she was home. It had been a long and demanding day both physically and mentally. She hated working a Saturday shift. Why didn’t people visit their GP’s during the normal working week when their ingrowing toenails and haemorrhoids actually played them up rather than stoically storing it all up for the walk-in centre on a Saturday?  Their stoicism didn’t last till the weekend, did it? Oh no. Come Saturday afternoon it suddenly became unbearable and there they all were, lined up in front of her window, whinging and moaning that the queue was longer than that at Asda and they needed to get home before the old man got back from football. Still, she was home now. She rooted through her bag for her front door key, minutes away from a nice cup of tea. She was on a promise tonight. Not that! Sixty was too old for that sort of promise. At their age it needed planning. She snorted in affectionate amusement. No – Gerry had promised to cook tonight so she could put her feet up and be treated like a Queen. She found her key at last. It was funny that no-one had realised she was there – they were usually alert for her bus going past having dropped her off. She realised something was wrong as soon as she opened the door. Darkness. Darkness and silence. All the doors from the hallway were closed and the usual sounds of the TV downstairs and a ghetto blaster from the boys upstairs were missing. Worst of all, not even the dog was there to meet her with his silly smile and wagging tail. She stood stock still and breathed shallowly.

            ‘Hello?’

Her voice sounded a little lost against the density of the waiting silence, too thin to do more than scratch its surface. She tried again;

            ‘Gerry? Boys?  Butch?’

Her ears pricked as she thought she heard a distant whine, instantly cut short. What to do? Should she phone the police? How foolish would she feel if they all turned up, lights flashing, sirens wailing, neighbours goggling only to find that Gerry and the boys had walked the dog down to the local shops to pick up something they needed for dinner. Her hand groped for the light switch and she took a deep breath, steadying herself before she stepped into the hallway. She took off her coat and realised that, as usual, there was nowhere to hang it. All the pegs were full. Oh god. Were the family lying unconscious – or worse -  behind one of those closed, forbidding doors, having come across a burglar in mid spree? They wouldn’t have gone anywhere on a night like this without their coats.

            ‘Silly. Silly silly silly’.

She’d go and make herself that cup of tea, sit herself down for five minutes and then they’d be home. Her footsteps echoed ominously on the laminate of the hallway. It was lovely for keeping clean but not so good when it reminded you of the sound effects in a second rate horror movie. She reached out towards the door handle and slowly, slowly opened the door. The silence thickened; the darkness beyond the door was exaggerated by the light seeping in from the hallway; she pushed the door wide and as she stepped through –

            ‘Surprise!’

The suddenness of the light momentarily blinded her; the blast of sound confused. She looked round open-mouthed at the row of glasses raised in her direction, the glistening teeth of the smiles ranged behind.

            ‘Happy Birthday, darling’

            ‘Happy Birthday, Mum’

            ‘Happy Birthday, Josie’

And finally the dog was there, freed from the hand firmly around his muzzle, wagging and whining and leaning on her leg.

****************************************************

Prompt: How did you and your partner meet?

PM from me to my bestie:-

OMG! OMG!  OMG! I can’t believe I have met him. At last. Mr. Right.  Mr. Perfect. Mr. Scrummy-Yummy-Yumptious (hyphenated, of course!) It really is about time. I mean, honestly! How many Mr. Wrongs can you go through before you just give up? 

I met him on that website. You know ‘No strangers, no dangers’. I was in the chat room with the girls and a couple of lads from up North somewhere (Chelsea fans – LOL – no chance there) and he PM’d me. He is sooooo dishy. Over six foot (he’ll make me look small even in those four inch heels) with black hair, just a bit of gray at the sides. He says the men in his family always go gray young. I said he’ll look like my Dad except my Dad isn’t old enough for gray hairs yet even though he says we are enough to give him plenty. Anyways, you are the only person I can tell at the mo. He says we need to take things slowly because he’s been hurt plenty in the past and it’s better if we just keep it between ourselves for now. That’s why we haven’t actually met yet. But he is so romantic. We spend hours just talking – Mum and Dad keep asking why I look so tired. LOL. If only they knew! He can’t use his webcam at the moment so I haven’t seen him in real life. He’s living with his Mum because she is quite old and until they can get her into a home he has to look after her. He says he’s embarrassed at the state of the place and that’s the other reason he can’t invite me round yet. Obviously he can’t come round here. I mean – hello! Can you imagine the faces on the oldies????  He loves my webcam though. He thinks it’s really funny how pink and girly my bedroom is and he laughs when he sees me in Disney jim jams. He says I look like a little girl! Bloody cheek!! He’s suggested a hotel for a night. This is top top secret. You have to promise not to tell anyone – I mean no-one at all . I’m going to say I’m coming up to stay at yours . You will cover for me, won’t you? I’ll let you know times and stuff as soon as he says when. 

Memories of the Taj Mahal

What made me buy a jigsaw?


1. They were there. I rarely shop for pleasure but I am a sucker for books, stationary and arty crafty places. As you can imagine then, ‘The Works’ does it for me. I can’t remember what I went in for, but I came out with more. Including the jigsaw.

2. The picture on the jigsaw was the Taj Mahal. Just looking at it brought back the heat, the smells, the sounds of India. The thought of absorbing myself in that for a while was quite appealing.

3. I love the feelings associated with jigsaws - childhood with Grannies (though I really can’t think that any of my grandparents ever did jigsaws!), holidays and - best of all - me and Rob sitting quietly together in a shared activity. Rob soon disabused me of that final notion but not of the feeling.

4. Doing a jigsaw is a meditative activity. It stops the noise of the brain whirring. Therefore it is healthy.

We went to India in 1999, I think. It was one of the promises Rob made to me. You know when you meet a man in a nightclub and he makes you lots of promises? That was Rob. ‘I’ll take you on a proper date’; ‘I’ll take you to Dublin’; ‘I’ll take you to India’. Having heard it all before, I enjoyed the evening for what it was and didn’t go to all the effort of raising my hopes.


Within a week we’d been to the pictures - he booked the tickets, dressed up nicely and gave me a gentlemanly kiss on the cheek, arranging to see me again before taking his leave at the end of the date. He also had the temerity to think he could share my pic’n’mix, but that’s a different story. We saw ‘Men in Black’ and he bought me the soundtrack afterwards - although what he actually gave me was the empty CD case, because he’d been listening to the album and had left it in the player!


Within three months we’d been to Dublin. He booked us into a lovely hotel in Temple Bar and we cruised the city in the day and drank cocktails and danced through the streets at night.


Then we went to India. Rob had been before, on a properly organised holiday, staying in the Clarks Shiraz in Agra. Rob is always confident and said ‘We’ll just book the tickets and decide what to do when we get there’. So that is what we did. My experience of travel was limited. I’d been to Spain to stay with a friend, travelling with my equally unsophisticated sister. I refused to go through the check-in until nearly the time of our flight because I’d envisaged a claustrophobic waiting room where we’d all be packed together to wait. When we finally went through and realised it was spacious shopping heaven through there, it was too late and I was not popular.  I’d also had a weekend in Paris with my very young husband where we were nearly defeated by a ferocious camembert. It wouldn’t let us back in the hotel room after a day by itself in the sun. We’d sent the children to school then left the country before my Dad had arrived to babysit. I had so many ‘just-in-case’ arrangements in place that my poor Dad felt like he was being stalked. With this breadth of experience, I was quite happy to just book tickets to India and go. How difficult could it be?


As the time for departure got closer, Rob began to let drop slight hints of his underlying - ‘worries’ would be too strong a word.

“I’m not sure how you’ll cope with the smells’
‘I’m not sure what you’ll eat, because they don’t have bread in India’
 and - best of all -
‘There aren’t any toilets’.

Rob still says that is not what he said at all, but all I can say is that is what I heard. When I was seventeen (oh, and such a young, naive seventeen) and had just - days ago - left school, I set off for Switzerland to work for the summer. My future stepmother had helped me find the job and my Dad had booked my train tickets. I vividly remember getting to Swindon station - on the way to somewhere beyond Interlaken - and saying ‘I don’t want to go’.  My Dad was very reassuring, he put me on the train and held the door firmly shut until it pulled away. Getting on the plane to India was similar.

To be continued.

Househunting.

This is probably the first story I have attempted since junior school. Actually no - I'm forgetting  'Lucky the Naughty Dog' and 'The Princess and the Slug'. I may need to look those out. It is, however, the first story I am daring to share. Both the writing of it and the sharing of it are practice for the Creative Writing module I am due to start in September. The prompt for the story was taken from the Writer Wednesday Blog Hop. I was too late to enter that week's story share, and the story doesn't actually conform to the requirements. However, I appreciate the stimulus and will work towards joining in properly at some point. I hope you enjoy the story (if there is anyone out there). Have a go yourself. It's fun.

Househunting

            She wasn’t shocked so much by the screaming as by the way it contrasted the deep quiet that preceded it.

           

            “What the…?” Their three heads swivelled as the shrieks bounced around the dark walls. The crash of the heavy door against the arm of the overstuffed sofa focussed them on their source.

           

            “Jasper? What…?”

            “Babies!”

            “Babies?”

            “Dead Babies. There are dead babies everywhere. I think I saw one move.”

            Confusion vied with the need to take the sobbing child into her arms. The house was heavy with the smell of dust and mothballs; day-to-day noises were absorbed by the wooden panelling and faded velvet curtains – but dead babies? One could imagine a stuffed fox or two. The estate agent laughed a little too shrilly.

           

            “Probably the dolls.”

            “Dolls?”  She seemed to have lost the knack of doing more than repeating the last word of every sentence. She looked at the estate agent and tried again. “Erm…dolls?”. No. It was all she could manage.

            “The lady who lived here - poor Mrs. Iles – was a bit of a collector. There is a story but we usually show you around downstairs before we warn….err, before we…” She sighed. “Before we warn you.”

           

             The three of them plonked down in the indentations left on the sofa by years of bottoms. Jasper parked his six year old behind firmly on his mother’s knee. No-one here would tell him that not only was he too old for such babyish behaviour but moreover he was a boy. Any of his friends, if they’d seen what he had seen, would be on someone’s knee too. He hiccoughed and a thumb crept unnoticed towards his mouth.

           

            “Mrs. Iles still thinks she is coming home so we can’t move anything until the house is sold. We’ll clear it then of course.” She turned a wide and hopeful smile towards the puzzled faces. “The price reflects the décor.”

           

           “But the babies?”

            “Dolls. The dolls. Mrs. Iles couldn’t have babies so she rescued dolls. Well, I say rescued.” The smile had faded, her drooping shoulders presaging a sigh that was taken up and passed around the limp aspidistra, the table with its tea-towel protection and the dangling fringes of the antimacassars. Hope put its tail between its legs and slunk behind the sofa.

            “People say she stole them.”

            “Stole them?” Good grief! She was stuck in a groove. She cleared her throat and gave herself a mental shake. “Ahem. She stole them? Who from? And what did she do with them?”

            “Looked after them. Nothing was ever proven against her. Nothing.”

            She stood up with such decisiveness that Jasper staggered three steps sideways, his thumb jolting damply to his side.

            “Let’s see these doll babies.” And grabbing a small, sticky hand she headed for the stairs, her husband and the estate agent like reluctant bridesmaids bringing up the rear.

***********************************************************

          

           “No wonder Jasper had the heebie jeebies.”

            She put her knife and fork down and considered the wisdom of having ordered trout with the head on after what they’d seen today.

            “Four bedrooms and these dolls lying on every bed. I don’t know – ten to a bed? All of them dressed in baby clothes and wrapped in blankets. It would have been sweet but they had no heads. All these little bundles and no heads. What with all the curtains drawn and that eerie quietness, well, you didn’t want to look behind you.”

 Her friend’s eyes were getting wider and wider.

            “Did you…did you…touch anything?”

            “God, no! The estate agent just wanted us out of there. She kept muttering about the amazing potential of the kitchen space and the possibilities for a wine cellar. As if we were going to look in the cellar after the bedrooms! What’s wrong?”

 Now neither of them was eating. Her friend leaned forward and glanced to each side.

           

           “I forgot you didn’t grow up round here. We weren’t allowed to go near the Iles’ house when we were children. It wasn’t just our dolls that disappeared. When I was about six, a real baby was taken from outside the bakery in the village. Mrs. Iles was questioned but nothing was ever proved. She wasn’t seen much after that. Mr. Iles did all the shopping and stuff until he died last month. I don’t think anyone was invited into the house until she was taken sick and had to go into the home. Oh God!” She shook her head slowly. “I’m glad I’m not the one who has to go and sort through all those dolls.”