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.