Countdown

There are four more days left before I set off on my adventure. I’m filling my pencil case and searching for holes in my planning. I’m writing lists of things I need to take and things I need to do before I go. I’m having long staring contests with my suitcase, trying to figure out exactly how much stuff I can take with me. And I’m panicking just a little about whether my goals are achievable and whether I’m putting too much pressure on myself.

I’ve had this trip booked for about eight months so it seems odd to think that now it’s actually about to happen. Suddenly I’m realising just how brave I’m forcing myself to be, determined as I am to really live in this project for a couple of weeks. Suddenly I’m realising that the time has come to really test all this work I’ve been doing... and I have to admit, a tiny part of me is sad that soon it will all be over.

I won’t be posting here much while I’m away (although I might post a few photographs if I’m feeling gloaty!) and I will be having a couple of weeks off The Character Project. I think it’s going to take rather more self-control than I have to stay offline completely, so I’ll be about here and there... but expect me to be quiet for a few weeks.

This week, I will mostly be panicking and trying to finish off my preparations. Then on Saturday, I will set off for my quiet cave by the sea.

Fingers crossed for me not having lost my marbles by the next time I post!

Image by Joe Mabel

A Concert before Lunch

You’ll have noticed the lack of posts round here lately (especially of the non-writing-related variety). This largely correlates with the lack of life I’ve been having as I suddenly find out where my self-discipline’s been hiding and start making up for lost time. My house is a mess too, but we won’t go into that.

I haven’t really being doing anything apart from going to work and spending long evenings at my desk. This is a good thing. But it’s making me antisocial, uncultured, and slightly peculiar... and as such, things to write blogs about are proving few and far between.

So it’s a good job I work in a primary school and occasionally get to go on educational trips.

Today’s was with a year five class to see the London Symphony Orchestra play. This isn’t the first time I’ve realised how lucky we are to live in London or how lucky our children are to get these opportunities.

The concert was aimed at Key Stage Two children and was really well structured to keep them engaged and teach them (and me, who’s generally ignorant of all things music) about the workings of an orchestra.

My overwhelming feeling about it was, as it is at pretty much every music event I attend, one of total admiration.

I can never quite get over how all those individual instruments, by playing all at once, can create such an immense sound. The LSO played excerpts of various well-known pieces for the children, and this really highlighted for me just how amazing it is that this music can be produced.

Watching the musicians work together to produce these magnificent pieces made me admire their discipline, skill and – perhaps more than anything – lack of ego. In order to play in an orchestra, in order to play these amazing pieces of music, the musicians have to give themselves over to the group. No one’s going to say, “Oh, I really thought the fifth violin sounded beautiful tonight.” In an orchestra, a musician is like an ant: only useful as part of the colony. I couldn’t do that (even if I could play an instrument). My ego’s quiet... but it’s there.

My other thought, mixed up with the admiration and the gratitude, was how lovely it must be if your job is to play in a major orchestra. Like anyone who gets to pursue their chosen art form for a living, these people are doing what many people will only ever dream of.

And for me, it was a great way to spend the working day!

Image by Ian Britton

Edit and Destroy!

I recently discovered an editing flaw that I didn’t realise I have.

When I’m editing something, I tend to read it out loud repeatedly, trying to catch the lumps and bumps that I don’t see when I’m reading through in my head. Sometimes I’ll have to stop for a while because the lump is actually more of mountain and needs some serious flattening out.

And then I’ll have to go back to the beginning again because I’ve lost my flow.

The result? A seriously over-edited first couple of paragraphs.

Somewhere in the middle of the process, the extra time I spend on the beginning of a piece of writing pays off: the chinks are ironed out and all the words are working nicely together... and then I take it too far.

I stretch the metaphors and polish the imagery so much that it becomes blinding and you can’t see what I was referring to in the first place. It’s a bit like when you’re cooking and you enjoy adding the spices so much that you keep on adding them – just a bit more of this and a tiny extra sprinkle of that - and then what you end up with is inedible.

I can’t see the extent of the damage while I’m doing all this because every time I read it I’m still thinking of the meaning I know was there when I started. It takes a bit of distance – at least a few days, if not longer – before I realise what I’ve done.

An example: the first line of Biscuit, which was the piece I wrote for The Character Project a couple of weeks ago: “A fruit fly scuttled round the ochre-green flowers, rubbing its feet through ceramic pollen.”

Any idea what that’s about?

No, neither did I when I read it back the other day.

I’ve removed all reference to the bathroom tiles I was talking about. I’ve totally undermined the impact of the ochre with the mind-boggling image of ceramic pollen. And I’ve succeeded in making the fruit fly sound seriously disoriented, which is perhaps something of a feat in itself.

This is clearly something I’m going to have to watch out for.

Image by Corey Anderson

A Story

Today's post is a cheat, I'm afraid. I wasn't going to cross-post any of my stories for The Character Project, but I've had computer problems this weekend and my to-do list is endless. So I've pulled out a story from a few weeks back. With a bit of luck, you didn't read it at the time!

Catching Breath

“That guy. The one over there in the red shirt. He’s been in here every day this week.”

Graham sighs. He should have known they’d get suspicious after a while. Not that it matters.

He watches his shadow creep across the swings as they fly backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. The two women are leaning against the flaked blue posts, occasionally pushing their daughters or waving to them as they whiz past in fits of giggles. They aren’t bothering to lower their voices. Perhaps they think he can’t hear them. Perhaps they want him to hear.

“Maybe he’s got kids,” the one with the yellow scarf says doubtfully, scanning the park for parentless children.

“He hasn’t.” The other one says.

They are hemmed in the neat hexagon of the park by a blue metal fence. He watches a heap of small bodies cling to the roundabout as an older brother races round in circles. A little boy chuckles gleefully as the seesaw thumps his feet to the ground and his sister bounces into the air. On a nearby bench, a young woman passes crusts of bread to her son, who throws them nervously at a scrum of pigeons and then retreats to the safe space between her legs.

Graham smiles. He could sit here for hours.

“Maybe we should call the police,” the woman in the pink coat is saying. “You just don’t know what he’s going to do, do you?”

He watches a group of older boys chase between the springy animals, immersed in some kind of game where the blue bits are safe. Their agile limbs tear through the air with boundless energy, their voices colouring the air in bursts.

“How long’s he been here anyway?” She’s lifting her daughter from the swing, zipping her safely into a fleece jacket.

The woman with the yellow scarf shrugs and steals a furtive glance is his direction. One of the boys runs up to her, wipes a glistening slug of snot along his sleeve, and bundles a duffle coat into her arms. He leans forwards on his knees while he catches his breath and then chases after the others, shrieking.

“Never have boys,” the woman tells her friend, shaking her head through the traces of a smile.

The woman in the pink coat laughs. “Well, be careful, alright? Don’t let Niall stay on and play here if you’re leaving, will you?”

The woman who knows football boots and grass-stained knees throws her scarf over her shoulder and looks behind her at Graham huddled in the same red shirt he’s been wearing these past three days.

“I’m not leaving him,” she says firmly.

The pink-coated woman nods and fires a long, bruising stare at Graham. “Well, we’re off then. Take care, alright?”

Graham doesn’t look at them. He watches an older girl swing between the monkey bars, her delicate body fluttering from post to post like a feather.

He focuses, as he always does, on their small limbs and laughing faces.

He tries not to think about the shrieking whiteness of the room in the hospital over the road or the small fragile girl laid out inside it. He tries not to remember the way a lorry looks when its nose is crunched into your passenger doors or the silence of a child caught beneath its bumper. He doesn’t think about his latest conversation with the doctor, the dark stains beneath his wife’s watery blue eyes. He doesn’t think about the tubes and the machines and his daughter’s breathless lungs.

He twirls an empty water bottle between his fingers, remembering how much Katie likes this park, wishing he could catch his breath for her and pour it from the plastic bottle straight into her lungs.

Thaw

Fiona Robyn has recently published her new novel, Thaw and has decided to blog it daily over the next few months so that you can read the whole thing for free. I haven't read it myself yet (I'll be reading it in blog form too) but I've read bits and pieces of Fiona's writing and have no worries about recommending it to you. She regularly posts tiny little gems at A Small Stone so I'm quite confident that Thaw will be a good read.

Thaw is told through thirty-two-year-old Ruth's diary as she takes three months to decide whether to end her life. Ruth's first entry can be read below. And if you like it, you can continue reading Thaw tomorrow here.

*

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

Continue reading tomorrow here...